“You came out of nowhere!” he said. “This angry nude boy with superhumanly taut muscle tone just running and screaming like a madman. It was horrifying! I-I guess I didn’t recognize you now with your wraparound sunglasses on.”

“But I heard you!” I roared.

“I don’t even use the F-word!” he said. “I say ‘fudge’ when I get upset, which isn’t often.”

“Huh,” I said.

“In fact,” he said, “as soon as I drove away I even used my car phone to call the police and the local psychiatric authorities to tell them a disturbed naked youth with highly developed calves needed counseling pronto.”

I looked out at the crowd and saw a pair of cops and a couple old dudes in white lab jackets with clipboards standing around. They smiled and gave me a supportive thumbs-up.

“Well,” I said. “You can see how I could make that mistake. What you said and what I heard sound very similar.”

“No, not really.”

“Wow,” I said. “So you’re really not an asshole! You really are a nice guy!”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “I really am a nice guy.”

I handed him my copy of The Wizard—which I now officially owned—and a pen. “Can a fan get your autograph?” I asked.

“Of course,” Fred Savage said. “Anything for a fan.”

I gave him a firm handshake. When it was all said and done he had been a worthy competitor.

The crowd cheered. My parents breathed sighs of relief. I fist-bumped Wolf Blitzer and wished him well with the whole twenty-four-hour-news thing, which sounded like a stupid idea.

Most important of all, I really had finally broken out of my small town, even though I’d only walked five minutes away from my house. I had my very first popcorn-box-with-a-VHS-tape-stuck-in-it trophy, and just like that I’d become the most famous, dominant gamer in America.

And guess what?

Blockbuster was so freaked out by the way I’d highjacked their one-time-only promotional tournament that they decided to hold a second one the following year. They wanted to give someone “normal” (lame) a chance to win.

So I came back and won the whole thing all over again. That pissed them off, so they announced they’d never hold one of their wildly successful national tournaments again. This was yet another example of why Blockbuster is the smartest, most timeless Fortune 3 company in the world. They’re just waiting for Netflix to make one wrong move before they come roaring back to dominance.

Unfortunately, Fred Savage couldn’t make it back for the 1994 championship, but I did get my parents to drive me there in our very own onyx-black Lamborghini Diablo. I may have even convinced them to let me take the wheel myself for a block or two. Yeah, it was a rental, but if there was one thing I knew, it was this: