I quickly discovered that wrestling was a much more intimate sport than football was. Instead of going outdoors to a breezy, hundred yard-long field for practice, you went into the school’s smallest, darkest, most claustrophobic room. Instead of wearing a uniform that was so bulky and dehumanizing you needed to iron the names of the players onto the back in order to tell them apart, you wore a thin piece of spandex and cotton (a singlet) that left nothing to the imagination.

When the equipment manager handed me my singlet for the first time, I felt like a showgirl in a movie who’d just been handed her new “costume,” which, of course, always turns out to be a tiny piece of lingerie on a hanger. “They expect me to wear this?” she says without fail.

The football players that I’d known through the years could be towel-snapping jerks. But the wrestlers? They were an entirely different breed altogether. They enjoyed being nude for some reason. As soon as they were behind closed doors, their clothes came off, and stayed off, until it was time to practice. Their hygiene, for the most part, was poor. They seemed to take great pride in the smells that emanated from their lockers. They literally tried to out-smell one another. The guy next to me routinely kept the following ingredients in his locker: one pair of sweat-soaked wrestling shoes, a jockstrap, a couple pairs of destroyed Hanes, some headgear, and a singlet or two, all wrapped up it all in a wet towel. I am fairly certain that this is the scientific recipe for the Ebola virus.

Onward now to level 2-9. There’s some serious bulls** going on with this level. It’s a small, claustrophobic level with many random ways to die packed into it. Here is a list of some of the things that will kill you:

1. You can fall and kill yourself.

2. The roaming, ceiling-crawling rhino-beetle will bump into you. 3.

3. A new enemy–a friendly-looking bird who randomly drops deadly eggs or poop (it’s impossible to say which)–spawns from a nest in the top left corner of the screen then flies around trying to murder you.

I’ll be honest–I felt the old tickle of despair again this morning. What if this gets too difficult? I thought. What if I wind up sitting here for hours every morning, neglecting the rest of my life, in the hope that enough good fortune shines down upon me to get me through the umpteen more small, claustrophobic, death-dealing levels that no doubt lay ahead?

In the end, enough good fortune would shine upon me today to get me through this gauntlet of doom. I started out with 14 Marios; I ended with six.

Here’s how I did it: the locked door is in the lower lefthand corner; the big key is in the upper righthand corner. The level is divided into a pair of three tiered small platforms. In the divide between these platforms are three small elevators. Two elevators go up; one elevator goes down. Hitting the switch in the middle tier will reverse which elevators go up and down.

After my fifth or six run at the key, I finally reach it. But my troubles are still far from over. With the key hoisted above my head, I begin my descent back to the bottom of the level. Side note: I can’t believe how much my palms are sweating this morning.

Things go fubar almost immediately. The bird comes sailing at me; the rhino-beetle is bearing down on me. I attempt to jump, but my nerves get the best of me and I hit the wrong button and instead toss the key. It sails into the levels below, bouncing a few times along the walls on the way down. Also: I am falling right behind it, with no platform to save me in sight.

During my descent, I somehow trigger the make-your-own-bridge power-up. I arrange it directly beneath Mario, not knowing if he has already fallen too far, if he’ll die regardless. I take my chances. Mario lands on the magic bridge. He climbs to his feet. Why? Because Mario is one tough little bastard–that’s why.

I snatch the nearby key, which is blinking (note: when the key blinks, it means it’s about to vanish from its current location and re-spawn back in the chalk outline of the key back at the top of the level). I manage to grab it on its final blink, then trip my way over to the locked door.

Yes, this is easily my least elegant performance yet. So long level 2-9, a.k.a. “The Devil’s Lair.”