Dreaming the Imbocceable Dream

There are twelve teams in the Wednesday night edition of the Northeast Bocce League, and the top eight make the playoffs. Well, everyone gets to keep playing, but only a team in the top eight can win. My team, the (variously spelled) Imbocceable Dream, has been lingering in ninth place for weeks. (Nearly every team’s name is a pun on the word “bocce.”) My sources tell me that after two strong weeks we’ve busted into eighth place. This is pretty exciting news. We can play pretty well when we focus, so if we can stay in the top eight, we just might have a chance to make some noise in the playoffs.

The photo shown above is not related to making or not making the playoffs. It’s just an image of the very rare situation in which two bocce balls are exactly the same distance from the pallino—in this case, touching or kissing (which when you do this is called a “baci,” a word too close to “bocce” in my opinion). We tried to slip a dollar bill between the balls at each contact point and could not. No points are awarded in a round that ends in a tie.