Once Upon A Time...

*This post was written by fellow Frontliner Kew Pei Li, on her personal experience in the Z'liners-PFA Floorball Challenge: Part 1.

I love fairytales for their happy endings. Call it what you want, I'm not a romantic, merely... old-fashioned, in a way. Although I admit I don't very much care about the female finding her one true love and being carried off into the sunset, 'past the gates of splendor into fairylands forlorn'.

They all start with 'Once upon a time' -ses, and so does mine. Four weeks before today, I get a call from Jason and was given the job to gather what I can of the ladies left in Frontliners and make two respectable teams, if possible.

So start the phone calls and the hike in my telephone bill which my dad is looking rather aggrieved about. Calling up everyone I know with about a 1 in 10 success rate (okay, so I don't have many girl-friends), and I get a rough draft of my teams.

Two weeks later I more or less have two teams of five to six players after much cajoling and demanding. Now to sort out the tactics and mind games before the real day. I plead with my friends to 'go fish' and get information from their friends in other teams, and at the end I know more or less everything I need to.

Simple enough.

Now the plot thickens as always, when the evil stepmother comes into the picture to disrupt the happy kingdom. People start pulling out. It adds and adds and adds, equaling to one major headache.

It's still okay, I can deal with it.

Then comes the stormy night when everything seems doomed to fail. And on these days even the gods seem to conspire against you...

Dah-lah I was already running on empty, spending the whole night arranging tactics and stuff to do when all I wanted to do was lie down and get some shuteye. And then in the morning I get Death's phone call, telling me He wanted Sharron.

Okay, actually it was Sharron, saying she was down with fever and diarrhea. Strike One.

And then two matches into the tournament, Yi Lin hobbles over to me and shakes her head. Cramps struck her over and over again, even with the bananas generously donated by UniHawks and the constant, rapt attention of the medics. Strike Two.

Now all I had left of my team were players who hadn't played in months and no substitutes left to use. Strike Three, and you're out.

The better teams won, most definitely, but I was incredibly disappointed because the end results did not equal the efforts put in.

The 4-0 win in the so-called derby win over Frontliners Inferno did little to help; it didn't count much because they too were depleted after last-minute pullouts.

It rained that evening and all I wanted was some hippo time to wallow alone.