We’d been working hard on Exacting Clam 20 for weeks, but that Saturday we broke early to attend the Clamball finals. I wasn’t the biggest Clamball fan myself, but my colleague Mar Doyle had been talking up the match all week as we set type together. “It’s going to be a bloodbath!” she shouted at me that Friday while arranging a stanza on the opposite page.

“A bloodbath doesn’t sound very fun,” I said, lining up two quotation marks.

“Editorially, I’m saying,” Mar said. “These two teams are just very evenly matched.”

“Who’s in it again?” I shouted from my quote.

“Long Days of Your Own Wherewithals versus Good News Rising From the Graves.”

“And you’re rooting for . . . ?”

She grinned and made a fist. “Wheres all the way baby!”

So around four p.m. on Saturday afternoon, a big group of us—me and Mar, our colleague Emily Why, a few of the authors and some phrases from the issue, remember when the pine-scented room and Sunrise, the outermost circle —walked out to the page 133 stadium. Even before we reached it, though, we could hear the thrum of language in the distance. Then we saw the tailgating phrases—retired to Canutillo as a relic equal cooking up hotdogs on a grill, a generous celery stalk pounding a beer.

We found our seats right before the first sentence. Mar’d purchased a block right at midpage, so we could see everything: the shining clam, the nervous ink, the punctuation on the sidelines. The atmosphere was the word charged—you could have cut the word tension with the word knife.

One of the reasons I’d never gotten into Clamball, though, was because I don’t totally understand the rules. I knew the clam—or was it the word clam?—was carried by issue phrases from one end of the page to the other, editing themselves to make meaning while the defending team tried to check or demean them. It was the penalties that confused me. What constituted ‘meaning,’ exactly? Was fighting allowed or wasn’t it? And how could you tell if a phrase was off sides?

I would have asked Mar these questions, but before I could the copyeditors raised their red pens to bring the phrases midfield. “Here we go Wherewithals, here we go!” Mar began singing. “Here we go Wherewithals, here we go!” The chief copyeditor held the clam above the fold, then dropped it—the game was underway. The Graves won the drop and read the clam down the page, passing to the Flogger and then It Is Still Beautiful to Hear the (clam’s) Heart Beat. Should be accepting of life’s vicissitudes tried to edit Homegrown Tender Meat with Lime Butter—and clam—but Lime Butter dodged Heart Beat and The Encouragement of Others. “No no,” muttered Mar. “Tackle the Butter! Get Butter!” But Lime Butter speedread into the margin, and just like that it was one clam to nothing.

“No!” groaned Mar, falling to her seat.

“Not a great start, Marry!” quipped Sunrise.

“Shut up,” Mar said. “Shake it off Wheres!”

And the Wherewithals tried to, reading the clam back up the side of the page—the numinous clam is cyclical, the shouting clam to spit its righteous wrath—but the Graves read their formation, intercepted, and counter-read past the fold. This time, though, a benevolent eagle planted a reversal and checked the Flogger right into his own bench.

In the stands, meanwhile, the word wave began and the pine-scented room went to concessions and came back with a round of beers and snacks. “Plenty of game left,” Why assured Mar, and Mar took a swig from her beer. By that point, I think our whole group just wanted her to see her team win.

But it was a tight contest—the clam going back and forth, with neither team giving a paragraph—through the first reading and the second. Late in the third, though, the Wheres’ alone and ever changing took advantage of a bad transition and skimmed the clam up the far margin to even the score. A fight broke out near the page number, the Flogger and alone, both phrases swinging letters, until alone dragged the Flogger to the page.

With only three minutes’ reading time left, though, the Graves’ coach a writhing green vine started signaling cryptically from the margin. “What’s that?” asked Why, pointing to You wake up with a stone in your stomach. “What are they doing?” Stone, we realized, was changing tense—from wake to woke—right there on the field. Every Grave on the page, we now saw, was following suit, shifting from present to past. Suddenly everything is was: it was still beautiful to hear the heart beat, the author was all over the keyboard. While the Wherewithals tried to adjust, the Graves peppered them with endings—clammy in the face of pain, he made sure to cherish the clam—in an attempt to finish the match.

But this turned out to be the Graves’ mistake. Seeing the endings, the Wheres’ coach to indulge in smug admonishment began shouting something to his players. “Start over!” he seemed to be saying. “Start over!”

“Is he saying ‘start over’?” asked Why.

“Yes! Here we go,” said Mar quietly.

“I don’t understand,” said Sunrise.

“They’re going to run a new beginning.” Mar leaned forward in her seat.

Soon I understood: To counter the endings, the Wheres were flooding the page with beginnings: Now don’t clam me wrong, Waiting for the clam excitedly, Observation is a deliberate clam, we’d been working hard on Exacting Clam 20 for weeks. This caused the score, in turn, to shift back to what it was at the start: zero zero all.

The opposing phrases looked clamiffled. “What?” shouted a writhing green vine from the Graves’ sideline. “Copies, what?”

But it was too late. In all the confusion, the Wheres forward a very drunk, self-pitying Truman had picked up the clam and bolted for the margin. “Look at Truman!” shouted Doyle. Truman evaded one grave phrase, then two. Mar leapt to her feet. “Go Truman Go! Go!” we shouted. “Go Truman!” Truman read past Lime Butter and juked the Flogger. Wouldn’t it be nice to be cured? made one last leap for him, but Truman denoumented him and spiked the clam into the footer as reading time expired, and we leapt to our feet and roared in victory.