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.
