#155. Dennis, Masato, and the Big Mistake (Friday, February 22, 2013)

What was your best day…of witnessing a screw-up of epic proportions?

Despite one pretty major fuck-up near the end, Dennis and Masato’s visit to North Carolina went pretty well.

Dennis Bei was a Waterloo classmate and friend with the most enthusiastic sports fandom—baseball, but basically every other North American sport as well—I had ever seen. When he found out I was going to Duke (#4), the first thing he told me—after congratulations—was “You gotta get us some tickets to some Blue Devils basketball games, because we’re coming to visit.”

Well, true to his word, Dennis made the trip happen—with my best friend Masato Takamura (#32) tagging along as well. I had already gotten tickets from my classmates Walter (#85) and Jenna¹ for Sunday’s Boston College game. But before that, they wanted to marvel at the beautiful Duke campus and, of course, spend some time hanging out.

They arrive Friday before noon, and we have lunch at Alivia’s (starting point of the pub crawl night a month earlier, #53). Then, after an afternoon touring campus, we go to the economics graduate office and meet up with several of my classmates², before several of us drive over to the Cuban Revolution restaurant in Durham’s Tobacco District.

It’s a pretty sizable group there. Besides Masato, Dennis, and I, there are Walter and Jenna (who we cover, of course); Jenna’s Duke campout partners, Erin Liu and Qiao Tong; my current best friend Jason Simonsen (#109, #63); our basketball teammates³ Colin Garcia and Isinachi Ebute (#91); my other good friend David Tao; Jonathan Scriver from the program; Florian, the German exchange student and my building neighbor; and one person whose face I can’t make out in the photo.

Yes, I’m counting them all. Because this wasn’t just a mere crossover between universes (which you know I love, #51, #9), but a full-force collision I had initiated between the closest people in my old life and a large crowd from my new one—people with plenty in common, but who would have been very unlikely to meet otherwise.

But the night is not over. A group of nine (us three, Jason, Jonathan, Walter, Erin, and Qiao) head to my apartment, where we play the only game we could possibly play. Japanese Napoleon (#32). We split into two groups, with Dennis, Masato, and me separately explaining the convoluted rules of this brilliant game. Inevitably, we get the others hooked and play a full round. It’s Jason’s first time playing, but the former Davidson tight end, current Bayesian stats pro, and future football betting entrepreneur absolutely annihilates everyone. As he wraps up the victory, he just shrugs and says, “It’s just logic”. Then we finish the night in a smaller group with Walter and Jonathan, playing Catan.

Side Note: Near the end of the term, I develop a MAJOR thing for Erin, just as several academic and career problems emerge, leading to the internal crisis referenced in #91. I later tell Masato about all this, and he makes me feel slightly better by recounting an extremely awkward toilet-related incident between the two of them at my apartment. Use your imagination. Apparently it got resolved, because I had no idea it had happened.

The rest of the weekend is almost an afterthought. On Saturday, the three of us take the rental car to the Carolina Premium Outlets for North Carolina barbecue, wandering the shops, and catching up on the previous eight months, followed by a Carolina Hurricanes game at PNC Arena versus the Lightning. Sunday, we sleep in, grab wood-fired pizza, then stop by my apartment before they head to Cameron Indoor Stadium for the supposed highlight of the trip.

Except, just as they’re about to leave my apartment, we find out the game is almost over.

Apparently, Dennis had mistakenly thought the game was at five instead of two. None of us knew how. And it’s three-thirty right now. We rush over to Cameron anyway, just in time to see everyone streaming out of the building after a 20-point Duke victory.

So they had completely missed the one thing they had travelled over five hundred miles to do.

Tragic.

Walter and Jenna had both done the infamous Duke campout (#109) earlier that year and were lucky enough to have someone in their groups win the ticket draw.
The natural first topic of conversation is Andrew Wiggins, the Canadian high-school basketball phenom who would commit to Kansas a few months later and go first overall in the NBA draft the following year.
We played in a graduate-student rec league that term. The night before, we had beaten a political-science team called Heads of State by one point after fouling a three-point shooter on the final play and watching him make only one of three free throws. The big draw of the league was that the finals were played in Cameron Indoor Stadium.