I’ve finally gotten my oldest to regularly play ARAM matches with me. He’s been playing League far longer than I and was the person who sucked me into playing League in July of last year. He is still my primary conduit of great League tips and info, reminding me as I am waiting to summon what an opponent champion’s moves are as well as instructing me on the best builds for whomever I happen to be playing. A total gold mine of great information.

However, he like myself is rather sensitive to ragers and has generally avoided PvP as a result. He used to play PvP Dominion matches with me on occasion, but typically we queue for bot matches.

As time has passed he has joined me for an ARAM match here and there. He has grown increasingly confident and for the last several days we have queued together in one or two ARAM matches a day.

Early this evening we had a great run. It started with a match where he rolled Maokai and I rolled Ahri and we had a blast, handily winning in about 20 minutes with never a moment of retreat and my oldest racking up far more kills than I did on Ahri (shame on me). The next match was one for the record books…

He rolled Varus and I rolled Morgana so we were both super stoked to play. We also had Zilean, Karthus and Amumu on our team. Sweet team comp! I was a tad bit worried when the player who rolled Karthus asked if anybody wanted him. He is so strong in ARAM…what gives? He likely just doesn’t play Karthus and the gameplay that ensued showed that to be true.

Fairly early in the game, after clearing the enemy team at least once, maybe twice, it was myself, my oldest and Zilean hugging our tower for dear life. Waiting, waiting…hey, where is everybody? We finally realized that Amumu had never left the platform and Karthus, after several suicide deaths and repetitive enemy feeds, was pouting or raging or something and was also at this point not joining us. For about 5 to 8 minutes the three of us managed to hold our tower, taking one or two of them at a time, making small pushes forward but of course never being able to make any solid push with us going 3 on 5.

Despite the huge imbalance in numbers, we were outleveling the other team and making stronger and stronger pushes, beginning to whittle down their first tower. It was exhilarating to watch a full team of 5 dance around just the 3 us, afraid to take us on because we were at this point so much stronger despite our small numbers. In one of the team skirmishes, both Zilean and I finally died and my oldest, playing Varus, swept through them and scored his second penta in two days (yes, I am insanely jealous).

Somewhere in this insanity Karthus decided to join us again. Although he tended to run pell mell into the fray, popping all his abilities and, after dishing out a significant amount of damage, simply dying, it was working for us. I saved my shields for my oldest and Zilean who were playing an amazing game, and we….were….winning! One tower down, then another, and then we were taking down their inhib.

But the numbers were finally catching up, particularly since we were all level 18 with our max builds and the enemy team was catching up in levels. Time was running short for us to finish them off. We made one last valiant push, with us now 4 on 5 (which, over the course of the game, roughly averaged to a 3.66 versus 5), but we failed to ace them. Instead, we were shut down and they quickly finished off our nexus.

To our credit, we held out for 33 minutes and well outscored them on kills and assists. We simply didn’t have the numbers or the luck to pull out the win.