It was a dark and stormy night, or so we thought. Myself and fellow Edge staffers Cassie and Aaron  were preparing for Molly Brannigan’s trivia night. For those of you unaware, the Molly Brannigan’s Irish Pub and Restaurant just down the street from campus hosts weekly pub trivia. It’s a great chance to gather some friends and test your pop culture knowledge. It also serves as  a great excuse to eat lots of appetizers. In past years, members of Edge would attend on a near weekly basis. Due to scheduling conflicts, we hadn’t attended in some time.

As we were finalizing our plans, an ominous message appeared in the GroupMe chat from our editor-in-chief, Michael Haas:  Beware the storm. (Editor’s note: Haas always misspells things in the group chat. Silly autocorrect!) With that mysterious warning hanging over us, the three of us set off for Molly’s. We were surprised to find no storm, just a normal fall evening. Cautiously optimistic, we continued on.

When we reached Molly’s we quickly realized that we had made a mistake. In our preparation, we hadn’t checked the official start time of the trivia. We had arrived at 8 but the competition had started at 7. Not to be deterred, we asked for a sheet anyway and proceeded to our table.

We were first seated directly next to the fireplace but found the heat an unbearable distraction so we were moved to a more suitable climate at the back of the restaurant. Once we were settled, we looked at our sheet only to realize we had missed 4 of the 7 rounds of trivia. But we wrote down our team name and settled in.

We started the first (5^th) challenge. We had been dropped right in the middle of the matching round. The matching round had not treated Aaron and I kindly in past events. Many a trivia night we had started the evening with high hopes only to be sunk by the dreaded matching round.

This week, we were given 3 words and had to find a word that linked all of them together. Some were easy, but I stared at “star, cat, gold” and for the life of me could not solve this puzzle. It felt like that one scene in “The Hobbit,” except I was Gollum. That question aside, we managed to fill out most of the sheet and ended the round feeling pretty good.

Our sheets were collected and after scoring we got to hear the correct answers. It was fish! Star fish, cat fish, and gold fish. I felt like an idiot. Gollum would’ve known that one. He loved fish. With my pride more than a little wounded, we began round 6.

This one was straightforward trivia: Questions about the 80’s in honor of the recently passed Back to the Future Day. It turns out we don’t know a whole lot about the 80’s, being that we, well, weren’t even born yet during that era. So we struggled through as best as we could, taking a few wild guesses along the way. As it turned out, more than a few of those ended up being right and we came away with 6 of the possible 10 correct answers.

This left us with one more round. The music round. This was another round that had dashed our hopes on trivia night before. Music trivia was the round where you hear a song and have to name the band that wrote it. All three of us seated at the table considered ourselves pretty avid music lovers, but we knew from past experience that this didn’t mean we would do well. Last year, Aaron and I had taken to filling in all the blanks we had no answer for with “Nickelback.” On one occasion that answer had actually been right.

But this round we tried our best to take a real stab at every question. We were sure at least a few of them were wrong, but we handed the sheet in anyway. We waited for what seemed like forever for scoring to conclude before the voice finally came over the speakers to announce the top 3 teams who would receive Molly Brannigan’s gift cards. We of course were left out of that group. No surprise there.

We were curious about just how low in the standings we were, so we checked the score board. We had received 14.5 points. The top team had received 35. But wait? What was this? A lower score was on the board. “The Dark Knights Who Say Ni: 14 points.” We weren’t the last place team! We missed over half the competition but had still managed to top a team that had been there all night.

We left Molly’s that night with a sense of accomplishment and vowed to return the next week to prove that not only were we not the worst team, but we were in fact the best.