I feel like what I am about to say is a bit of a strange notion and I’m not sure I have the words to quite capture what I mean. Last Saturday I played in a game of roller derby and my team won. This is my second season playing and my first ever win. It felt good, but it felt weird.

My beloved Reggies.
(Photo courtesy of Pop Hazard & Erin Green).

I’m not going to lie: I wanted to win. I wanted to do a victory lap and see my team take away the first bout of the year. But to be totally honest, winning didn’t feel as different as I expected. I came out of the game feeling the same way I always do: incredibly proud of my team, self critical but mostly pleased with my efforts, chuffed to be doing this crazy thing at all, in serious need of a beer.  My team played amazingly, we worked hard, some things didn’t work but a lot of things did. It was a really good game and I was really proud. Winning gave everything a rosy glow and it was nice, but it didn’t feel different in any real sense of the word. Is that as weird as it seems? I guess it’s a good thing, but I’m fairly baffled by the whole experience.

Really the only thing that felt different was that I finished the game with six penalties (worst ever) and a limp (x-rays pending), but that would have been true had we been points down instead of points up. I’ve been mulling it over all week and I worry that maybe I’m not competitive enough or that I’m missing something obvious. Maybe I just see team success differently and not as points on a scoreboard. Maybe I’m over-thinking it. I don’t know. It might be the next bout when I get my head around it. I might never get my head around it. It was just totally unexpected and strange.