Winning

He pulls a card from the stack.

Without looking at it he slides it into an envelope

seals it

puts it back.

They know the rules.

They play the game as well as they can

scoring as many points as possible

until time runs out.

He unseals the envelope

to reveal the criteria that will be used

to declare a winner.

It may be the points.

It may be who scored the most before time ran out.

Or it may be who had the lead for the greatest number of minutes

or plays

or who ran the most plays

or who had the ball the longest.

It may be any number of other things too.

Someone objects:

We should always use the same criteria for deciding who wins.

We could do that, he says,

but then we’d start to think we know

what winning is.