The team was nervous. This was the biggest thing they would ever play in. This was no mere regional cup, this was the cup to end all cups. This was two teams, one cup - someone had to shoot that ball into an arbitrary area in order to iterate on a commonly agreed upon number, which would then lead to the implicit obligation to feel bad if one had a lower number and good if one had a larger number - no one who would not obligate would bother to play - It was as simple as that on general terms. The same applied to life in general although it tended to skew the probability of antiobligationists due to nature being quite selective by its very nature ... which was also called evolution.

These very principles of competition in sports applied to evolution and one could safely say that sports were caused by evolution and not the other way around.

The test would show who had to be the one to feel bad and the one to feel good.

This was a great responsibility as those that rooted for a team would feel bad if they lost and feel good if they won as part of the obligation, layering these emotions onto the players until they became the symbol for the masses. In the previous first rebranding this amount of attention would give out free magical powers, but not in this one.

It merely increased the stakes, this intense pressure was what made the team so nervous.

A certain nervousness played into the motivation of playing, but when the risks and rewards grew so high it felt like a matter of life and death. And evolution sorted through a seeve of death - none of their ancestors had not reproduced and thus caused more sand to fall onto the seeve. What exactly did evolution sort?

This was a seeve, an assortment of holes, every single one of them large enough to fit the largest grain of sand through it. Everyone was falling, merely the question of those that caused others to fall, those that could perpetuate this sandfall of death.

They felt it, the desire to perpetuate which was driving the sandfall. This is what it meant to them and they all knew the feeling (if not acknowledging its entire meaning) and no one had to talk about it. But that was not how the game was played, the game demanded the obligation to be fulfilled, so the team captain spoke up: "My friends, the stakes are high. Should we win this, we will be remembered forever. But should we lose this, we will be remembered forever as losers. This is what we trained for, this is what we lived for until this moment. There are so many that depend on us. And I depend on you, you depend on me and we all depend on our families. So will we capture this one chance? Or will we let it slip, become something that we aren't?" the captain took a long breath and then looked into the eyes of each of his playmates. Burning gazes looked back, fists shot into the air and air exited all of their lungs, vibrating their well developed resonant chambers located underneath their heads on their necks. In letters it could be described as 'Huuooorg', the duplicate 'u's and 'o's describing the temporal length at which they exhaled these sounds.

Just across the field Chadens team had a similar ritual going on. They were all the same and that was their pride, unity in the face of these incredible stakes. Sure they had different skills according to their positions on the field, but in spirit they were one.

And the game started.