MARSHFIELD, WIS. — Doreen Halversen, who has hosted the second-Saturday bunco rotation in her dining room since the fall of 2009, has informed her five regulars that this weekend’s game is off, citing playoff seeding implications she is not herself able to articulate.
The cancellation, delivered Wednesday via a group text composed by her husband Wendell on her behalf, marked the first time in sixteen years that bunco has been pre-empted by professional football, and the first time it has been pre-empted by anything other than a funeral.
“I understand that the Bengals need a thing to happen, and that another thing also needs to happen,” Doreen said Thursday, standing in her kitchen near a tray of bars she had already begun preparing before the cancellation went through. “Wendell explained it twice. I have decided to trust him.”
Wendell Halversen, a retired meat cutter who watches roughly nine hours of football on a given Sunday and has done so since the Carter administration, was unable to fully reconstruct his original explanation when asked.
“It’s a Saturday game, which is unusual,” Wendell said. “And depending on the outcome, the standings will move around in a way that affects what happens next week, which affects the week after. I told her it was a big one. That’s the part she remembers.”
The five other regulars — Bev Tholen, Marlys Schreiner, Carol-Ann Veldkamp, Jan Pesch, and Marlys’s sister-in-law Sue, who fills in when Marlys’s hip is bad — received the text with what Bev Tholen described as “a range of responses.”
“Carol-Ann said fine,” Bev said, refilling a thermos at the counter of the Highway 13 Kwik Trip. “Jan said she’d already bought the wine. Sue said she didn’t know we were playing this week and was relieved. Marlys said a word I won’t repeat to a reporter.”
A makeup date has been proposed for the following Saturday, contingent on whether Wendell determines that game also carries seeding implications, which as of Thursday evening he had not ruled out.
Doreen, for her part, has agreed to watch in the living room, though she has reserved the right to do a crossword during commercials and to ask, no more than twice per quarter, who is winning and why it matters.
“He gets a Saturday game in January about once every ten years,” she said, sliding the bars into the freezer. “I can give him the afternoon. The girls will keep.”