I’m sure my mouth was gaping, because he patted me on the shoulder, said something like “Well, sorry about that, but congrats anyway,” and walked away, leaving me to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do next.

A backstage producer came up to me and asked, in the same tone that you ask a child you’ve found lost in a grocery store, “Would you like to find your publicist?” And I nodded my head sheepishly, so we tracked down Liz, the BuzzFeed publicist, who similarly greeted me like a child she’d lost at a grocery store and looked at me with a searching gaze, trying to detect what mood I was in, whether I found this all hilarious or maddening or both.

“What the fuck happened?” she asked me, and I was like, “I still have no idea. I just want alcohol.”

She led me farther backstage, where a row of photographers took the obligatory pictures of me holding my award. I’m clearly sweating my face off in all of those photos, and my smile looks like the smile of a person who just strangled a man in a motel shower, but what beautiful memories I’ll have forever.

Afterward, we walked back to the greenroom. There was still no alcohol there, just Sharon Osbourne and a platter of brownies. I can’t be positive, but I’m pretty sure I ate approximately seventy of those brownies in that moment.

To top it all off, John Stamos—who’d won for some show he was in—walked into the greenroom and went to set down his own award next to mine. And I said something like, “Uh-oh, we don’t wanna mix those up,” and he looked at me, dead serious, and said, “You can have mine.” But then he smiled that Uncle Jesse smile, even though I was already furiously stuffing his award into my back pocket. And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for my goddamn Men’s Wearhouse suit.

•  •  •

When everything finally died down, Jeremy and I went to the after-party. The heads of the accounting firm that tabulates the results of the awards—those people you always see on television carrying the suitcases—came up to me while I was double-fisting champagne with my award under my armpit (yeah, you just have to carry it with you the rest of the night) and apologized for the mix-up, but they assured me the results were all very real and I’d really, truly won the thing, which in some small way was a genuine comfort, since a part of me assumed they had only picked me out of pity over my laughable chances. I told them thank you between mouthfuls of appetizers, and we all took a lovely picture together that I’m sure exists somewhere in the universe.