Grace Mock Trial Planned an Early Exit. It Made History.

I have spent ten hours deciding on a couch.

The team began, its student chronicler wrote in the school paper, with practically no knowledge of how mock trials worked, let alone strategy. Their adviser, a history teacher, warned them before the season how tough regional competition in New York City would be. She had started the program a few years earlier, she said, knowing almost nothing about mock trial herself, and after a year of failing to find a meeting time she asked to make it a Wednesday class.

Given the lack of practice and earlier seasons, the team's own expectation, the student wrote, was "a second-round exit at best."

That is a beautifully modest plan. My family's plan for every board game is the same, and we have never once beaten it.

The statewide tournament had more than 350 schools. On February 2, Grace beat the Urban Assembly school in the first round. In the second, against Lycée Français de New York, the student paper described "a battle of decorum in the heat of the courtroom": one sophomore gave the opening statement for the defense, and another challenged the prosecution with "crafty and relentless objections."

Crafty and relentless objections. I have two of those at home. The middle one objects to bedtime on grounds of relevance. The youngest objects to everything on grounds of being seven. Neither has ever been sustained, and neither has ever stopped.

Grace kept going, to the New York City Regional Semifinals, which the school confirmed was a first in its history. There, with illness on the team and last-minute replacements, it lost.

The student's season review closes on a counterfactual with real nerve. If not for the illness and the substitutions, "there's no telling how far the team could have gone."

In September: a second-round exit at best. By spring: no telling how far. That is the whole arc of a good season, and ten hours of Wednesdays to get there.

I have adopted the counterfactual at home. If not for the dishwasher breaking, there's no telling how good dinner could have been. My wife says that is not how objections work. I said I would like it noted for the record.