A Snowball's Chance

It was a winter night, like many others, and this one started with a call to arms and a meeting place. This meeting place served cold beer and hot wings with loud music and scantily clad servers. We sat around a hodge-podge of tables, zigging here and zagging there, up to our elbows in hot sauce and telling outrageous lies until someone looked outside and saw the swirling snow coming down. I sent a scout into the night and he came back with the words I wanted to hear.
"It's perfect. Heavy and sticky."
We hastily rearranged the tables so that I was sitting across from Thurber. "Flip the coin." I said and he did. I called it and it came up the way I knew it would, the way I had dreamt it would. I looked around at the faces and made my first pick: Grant. He was fast and imaginative and a good hockey player. He wouldn't be worried if it came to the physical stuff. From there on in Thurber did exactly what I knew he would. He picked the biggest, strongest and slowest of the crowd, thinking that a snowball fight was all about a good arm. I knew better.
With the teams set, we paid the tab and prepared for battle. The boundaries were from Dalhousie to Parent and from York to Clarence. There were only a few rules.
1. No head shots, if you could help it.
2. Hiding behind pedestrians was cowardly and represented a forfeit.
3. Try not to hit any cars.
4. No hiding inside.
5. An appearance of the police meant the game was suspended.
And we were off.

I paired the guys with the girls, carefully separating the couples. If one half of a couple caught a snowball in the face the other would react too strongly and lose their cool. I kept Grant with me and picked two other guys, both small and fast and we formed the assault team. Since our ammunition was all around we didn't need to stockpile anything and we went mobile. I knew Thurber wanted this bad and I was counting on his aggression to work against him. I had beaten him three times in a row and he was out to get me. This was a modified version of capture the flag and Thurber and I were the flags.

Grant and I and our flankers went straight up Clarence, the death zone, into the thick of it, simply because there is no such thing as a snowball fight in which you don't get pelted. I sent out our flankers to stir up the ones hiding behind the cars and in the alleys and one by one Grant and I sent them running in a barrage, all the while nimbly dancing out of the way of the rockets Thurber's goons were sending our way. He was right in one sense, Thurber was. If one of his guys hit you it would hurt. He was wrong in another. They couldn't run very fast and Grant was a great shot. The other two were so fast no one could hit them at all and we worked our way up the street to where Thurber had made camp across from the Heart and Crown.

From the beginning our small teams had been routing Thurber's gangs, using speed and agility to dodge the heat and push them ahead and by the time we had herded them all into a group on the corner, Thurber knew he had lost again. He did what he always did and prepared for a valiant last rush on the circle closing in on him. He came straight for me, the flag, with my team pushing from all sides.

Thurber's biggest mistake was to pick a corner to make his stand. With his entire team gathered around him, they quickly ran out of snow. My team, closing in from all sides, covered a lot more ground and had a huge supply of ammo. He called it, stuck in the middle of Clarence Street, out of ammo, looking like a snowman himself, and that made it four in a row.

The best part about a good snowball fight is the post-fight re-cap in which all of the heroics are recounted and lots of beer gets drunk. It might not snow for awhile and so, for now, my record is safe but there's always someone out there who thinks they can take the title. I'm already working on a new strategy.