At my competitive peak ~15 years ago I was on a team and we WRECKED Open and IM, undefeated seasons and deep playoff runs. Had a lot of success in Main, too. Strong winning records in the couple of seasons we played.

It must have been a slow night on IRC because we end up getting a chance to play a scrim against Team 3D. We were SO excited, in the server we were obsessively checking Steam IDs because we couldn’t believe it was an actual real life pro CS team. And we were gonna show em what we had!

They were on ANOTHER PLANET. Literally nothing we could do. Even when we knew what was coming, we’d just end up blinded and killed. We had to play so hard just to kill one guy.

We got close a few times but ultimately ended with 0 rounds. Part of being humbled is seeing just how far you have left to go. I still have mad respect for that team because they played seriously the whole time, let us have our chances to see if we could take an honest round from them. They were no doubt shit talking us in Vent, but all they said in game was “gg” and “good luck next season”.