Fargo Flea Flickers

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Fargo Flea Flickers
Fargo Flea Flickers logo
"OMAHA! BLUEBEARD! 45 DOWN! HUT HUT!"
Team Information
Name Fargo Flea Flickers
Abbreviation FFF
Nickname The Flickers
Primary Color #daed20
Logo  FFF.png 
Hometown Fargo, North Dakota
Stadium Red River Stadium
Emoji πŸ—‘
Status Active
Rivalry Crowns
Favorites
Integer 9
Movie Fargo
Divination
Element Fire
Power Word Sneaky
Motto
 
Template:Infobox team   •   edit
 

The FFF.png Fargo Flea Flickers are a Golly team from Fargo, North Dakota. They joined the league for the Rainbow Cup and, thanks to their success, were added to the league for the Klein Cup.

The Flea Flickers were formerly an amateur football team, and often adopt football tactics for Golly grids, although no one really knows what that means. The Flea Flickers are known for their sly tactics and secret trick plays.

Rainbow Cup

History

Fargo's Near Miss

As an expansion team in Rainbow Cup Season 1, the FFF.png Fargo Flea Flickers immediately defied expectations, clawing their way to the #1 seed in the Unwest League. This initial burst of dominance, however, proved to be a fleeting mirage. The Unwest League Championship Series saw them face an unexpected double-edged blade: the MW.png Mobile Wheels and the OSHA.png Jersey OSHA Violations . In a cosmic irony, their gritty football-style tactical play failed to account for the gritty determination and well-polished tactics of the OSHA Violations, who overcame the Curse of the Silly Goat and violated their way to their franchise's first Cup.

The Flickers, top seed though they were, found their well-laid plans disrupted and their trick plays failing. They were knocked aside in a brutal display of emergent chaos, as the Violations powered their way to a messy win and even messier celebration.

The Louisville Stepping Stones

Rainbow/Season 3 marked the first real chapter in the FFF.png Fargo Flea Flickers -LIL.png Louisville Illusionists rivalry. The Flickers dominated the League Championship Series, beating out the Illusionists, who still managed to make it to the Rainbow Cup series through their second-place finish - in a photo finish in the final game of the 7-game series, the Illusionists nosed ahead of the doomed DET.png Detroit Grape Chews to make it in.

The Flickers, who got off to a poor start and lagged far behind the pack in the first few games, shocked the world by rocketing back into contention. In a gritty back-and-forth between Fargo and Louisville for second place, the final finish was anything but certain. Fargo surged in the final games of the series, secured the series win, and brought home the first-ever franchise Cup to Fargo. Their mighty struggle with their rival Illusionists was the stuff of postseason legends.

Louisville's Revenge

Rainbow/Season 5 marked LIL.png Louisville Illusionists 's revenge against the FFF.png Fargo Flea Flickers . The Flickers and Illusionists both came into the Championship Series hot, and like a rematch of their Rainbow/Season 3 Cup Series struggle, it was gritty, hard-fought, and came down to the wire. The Flickers clinched first place, the Illusionists second, and both secured an appearance in the Rainbow Cup series against FF.png Phoenix Freshrolls and SLC.png Salt Lake Turbulence .

Whatever extra wind the Flea Flickers had at their back to help them tip the scales in their Rainbow/Season 3 victory, the Illusionists now had at theirs, as the tables turned disastrously for the Flickers early on. Unlike their prior surge from behind, the Flickers kept slipping, watching from a distant fourth as the Illusionists secured their first Rainbow Cup series victory and brought the franchise's first Cup to Louisville.

With their distant fourth place finish to their rivals' first place, Fargo's defeat to Louisville was not a mere ephemeral pattern, but a crushing blow with cosmic intent, imbuing the Fargo-Louisville rivalry with deep meaning.

Second Place Ceiling

The FFF.png Fargo Flea Flickers experienced an even year curse running from Rainbow/Season 14 through Rainbow/Season 18. The Flickers were a dominant team, repeatedly making it to the postseason Championship Series, securing a spot in the Rainbow Cup series, and making a strong showing - but also repeatedly coming up just a little short.

  • In Rainbow/Season 16, the Flickers managed to survive a brutal Championship Series beating by the LIL.png Louisville Illusionists and secure the second place spot in the Rainbow Cup series. They tussled with the Illusionists in an intense battle for second place, securing it in the final game of the series, but once again, the victorious SS.png Seattle Sneakers ran away with it, coming out 8🌈 ahead of Fargo.
  • In Rainbow/Season 18, the Flickers were certain they had a lock on the series. They had easily run circles around the second place MW.png Mobile Wheels , and early on in the Rainbow Cup series it was a two-way race between the Flickers and the Wheels. But in a legendary upset, the Flickers were bamboozled out of first place by the Wheels, who managed to keep a little in the tank and used it wisely to come out ahead of the Flickers in the final Rainbow tally.

Fargo in the Rainbow Cup Season by Season

Performance Chart

RainbowSeasonsQuantileGraph FFF.png

Summary

{{RainbowRankList SeasonAllTime Chron FFF}}


Klein Cup

History

Early Unsuccess

In their initial Klein/Season 4 foray into the Klein Cup postseason, the FFF.png Fargo Flea Flickers found the Hot League Division Series to be a cruelly effective gatekeeper. Their cunning and wiles were outmatched by VV.png Vegas Vampires , as if the very geometry of the Klein Bottle distorted their intended trick plays. Their narrow 2-3 defeat set the tone early for a long string of seasons with no postseason appearance or an early exit.

The Team of Destiny and the Sweep of Fate

Klein/Season 9 saw the FFF.png Fargo Flea Flickers team scrambling desperately to secure a postseason spot going into the final game of the season. As the team rallied into the final game, they had team t-shirts made that said "Team of Destiny" with the Fargo Flea Flickers logo. The t-shirts appeared to work, as the Flickers rallied to win their final game of the season. They secured a postseason toehold spot, facing off against the SFBS.png San Francisco Boat Shoes in the Division Series. The entire town of Fargo dubbed itself the "Town of Destiny," and Flicker fans began renaming their children Destiny.

But the Flickers would meet a chillingly swift end. In what would become known as the Sweep of Fate, the "Team of Destiny" t-shirts, the destiny train, the celebrations carrying the team into the postseason, all ran straight into the jaws of an 0-3 sweep by the San Francisco Boat Shoes in the Hot League Division Series. The Flickers' usual reliance on the trick play had backfired, the non-orientable Klein grid had turned everything inside out, and the team had slid right off the table. The "Fanbase of Destiny" was stunned, and Fargo went dark for several days.

To this day, opposing fans have been known to provoke fistfights in the stands with otherwise polite, amicable Flickers fans just by holding up handwritten signs in broken child-like writing saying "Team of Destiny".

Fallow Fields Recalibration

After the embarrassment of the Klein/Season 9 "Team of Destiny" episode, the FFF.png Fargo Flea Flickers fan base, knowing they were in for a "rebuilding," began to pack it in and prepare for a long, dark winter. Little did they know just how long and how dark the winter would be. The Flickers had been dismantled by the West Coast Boat Shoes collective, and echoes of "Omaha!" from Red River Stadium died out in the din of collective cosmic laughter, all directed at the Flickers' misfortune.

The Flickers began the painstaking, multi-season process of rebuilding. They pruned the parasitic sub-patterns that had led to their collapse. They cultivated and invented new, robust cellular patterns. The process was agonizingly slow. Constant re-evaluation of core algorithms and emergent behaviors led to doubts and second-guessing. But as the seasons crawled by, a horrible truth emerged: the Flea Flickers weren't getting better. They were, in the cold, hard data of the grid, demonstrably worse.

The team could see their new patterns were more susceptible to decay, their "trick plays" less deceptive, their "Fire" element reduced to smoldering embers. Their efforts to improve had been twisted into disimprovements. And so, the Flickers began a second, more desperate, multi-season rebuild. They hired dozens of consultants, installed thousands of dollars of high end equipment, and paid out the nose for compute power to churn through the massive piles of data they were producing. Old tenets were discarded, fundamental axioms were re-examined. All of this in an attempt, not to surpass their prior accomplishments, but to stop their endless slide and get back to zero.

Electrostatic Discharge and the Lost Season

Klein/Season 17 saw the Flickers finally finish their long, drawn-out rebuilding process. Despite a mediocre regular season performance, they snagged the #4 seed in the Hot League, and proceeded to pummel the BB.png Boylston Boogers in a Hot League Division Series sweep. Fans began to whisper about the "rebuild magic," not wanting to raise their voices too loud lest they jinx the team.

The Flickers took on the SGE.png Sugar Grove Eavesdroppers in the Hot League Championship Series, and seemed to have things cinched up by the time they had taken a 3 games-to-1 lead over the Eavesdroppers. But the Eavesdroppers fought hard to come back, and drove the series all the way to Game 7.

The Flickers gained the upper hand early in Game 7, and seemed to be cruising their way to victory and a Hot League pennant, when a sudden, eerie mishap - which was later discovered to be an electromagnetic pulse of "unnatural origin" - shut off power to the entire stadium, resetting the simulator state and voiding the game. Power was restored by the next day, but the psychological damage to the Flickers - whose pennant had been in their grasp, only to slip right through their fingers - had already been done.

The Game 7 rematch KleinCup.png 1d3c3649-fb13-484c-9553-9b415d526590 saw the Eavesdroppers dominate the Flickers 400-147 in a never-in-doubt victory for the Eavesdroppers.

Season 17 Hot League Championship Series Results Table
SGE.png Sugar Grove Eavesdroppers vs. FFF.png Fargo Flea Flickers

  Winner W Score Margin L Score Loser Generations Link
Game 1 Sugar Grove Eavesdroppers 222 9.46% 201 Fargo Flea Flickers 1,626 KleinCup.png 6d4c780e-4556-47c2-89f8-75a1cb009e28
Game 2 Fargo Flea Flickers 540 92.78% 39 Sugar Grove Eavesdroppers 4,387 KleinCup.png 5cdb69c2-4b87-498e-bc4d-169bd7d82156
Game 3 Fargo Flea Flickers 292 5.48% 276 Sugar Grove Eavesdroppers 1,295 KleinCup.png 2e0341f8-ab90-4055-94e1-000b486101cf
Game 4 Fargo Flea Flickers 292 11.99% 257 Sugar Grove Eavesdroppers 2,464 KleinCup.png aa8993cf-5f94-4691-a92a-1865da61cd12
Game 5 Sugar Grove Eavesdroppers 403 71.96% 113 Fargo Flea Flickers 6,071 KleinCup.png 2fba7bfd-a88a-4859-bf40-5906e470dc76
Game 6 Sugar Grove Eavesdroppers 315 9.84% 284 Fargo Flea Flickers 3,273 KleinCup.png dc4030bb-b6bc-4214-b9c7-ea91a3fac56a
Game 7 Sugar Grove Eavesdroppers 400 63.25% 147 Fargo Flea Flickers 2,077 KleinCup.png 90c8b2ee-5d2b-4102-89f9-f633187985d2

Fargo's Fury and the Tiny Town Showdown

The Flickers, after humiliating embarrassments, multiple rounds of embarrassment, and the ultimate heartbreak of being robbed of a pennant by a power outage, had primal fury to unleash on the rest of the league.

Finishing at the top of the division the Flickers entered the postseason as the #3 seed, and immediately extracted bloody revenge on the SGE.png Sugar Grove Eavesdroppers , who had robbed them of a pennant the prior season under "mysterious circumstances". The Flickers tossed the Eavesdroppers into the wood chipper in a three-game sweep that included a 649-11 victory lap for the Flickers.

The Flickers next faced off in the Hot League Championship Series against the perennial Choke Artists, the DET.png Detroit Grape Chews , who were approaching 100 seasons without a single Championship Series win. The Chews held their own for the first few games, but went down in 6 games, sending the Flickers to the Big Time - their first (and last) Klein Cup series.

The final Klein Cup Season 18 showdown, dubbed the Tiny Town Showdown, was between EA.png Elko Astronauts and FFF.png Fargo Flea Flickers . This matchup was completely new - the Astronauts, an original Golly franchise, and the Flickers, a Rainbow Cup expansion franchise, had never faced off before. The matchup was the stuff of legends - a dramatic series with swings toward the Astronauts, then the Flickers, both teams matching wits so well that everything boiled down to twists of fate, audacity, and sheer luck.

In Game 7, Fargo narrowly dispatched Elko, 354-281, to bring the franchise's first Klein Cup back to Fargo.

Season 18 - Klein Cup Results Table
FFF.png Fargo Flea Flickers

vs. EA.png Elko Astronauts

  Winner W Score Margin L Score Loser Generations Link
Game 1 Elko Astronauts 201 40.30% 120 Fargo Flea Flickers 2,061 KleinCup.png 2aec93cc-cff7-46dc-b214-c439fc6c0672
Game 2 Elko Astronauts 159 13.84% 137 Fargo Flea Flickers 3,156 KleinCup.png 557c4b11-74b6-4a33-8693-86019d7614a3
Game 3 Fargo Flea Flickers 505 82.38% 89 Elko Astronauts 4,802 KleinCup.png 1190d735-f503-4023-acf4-0f2e1a466025
Game 4 Fargo Flea Flickers 154 46.75% 82 Elko Astronauts 1,629 KleinCup.png 95650c82-827b-4210-9cc1-725b75e42eab
Game 5 Elko Astronauts 540 93.52% 35 Fargo Flea Flickers 1,936 KleinCup.png d7789bab-8475-48fa-b1d9-c9d4ed4e5dd5
Game 6 Fargo Flea Flickers 251 4.38% 240 Elko Astronauts 3,011 KleinCup.png 993badea-097e-44ee-a070-6d6f28359f42
Game 7 Fargo Flea Flickers 354 20.62% 281 Elko Astronauts 6,606 KleinCup.png 1d3c3649-fb13-484c-9553-9b415d526590

Fargo in the Klein Cup Season by Season

Performance Chart

KleinSeasonsQuantileGraph FFF.png

Summary

{{KleinRankList SeasonAllTime Chron FFF}}


Hellmouth II Cup

History

Fargo in the Hellmouth II Cup

Performance Chart

HellmouthIISeasonsQuantileGraph FFF.png

Summary

{{HellmouthIIRankList SeasonAllTime Chron FFF}}


Hellmouth III Cup

History

Fargo in the Hellmouth III Cup Season by Season

Performance Chart

HellmouthIIISeasonsQuantileGraph FFF.png

Summary

{{HellmouthIIIRankList SeasonAllTime Chron FFF}}


Hellmouth IV Cup

History

Fargo in the Hellmouth IV Cup

Performance Chart

HellmouthIVSeasonsQuantileGraph FFF.png

Summary

{{HellmouthIVRankList SeasonAllTime Chron FFF}}


Hellmouth V Cup

History

Fargo in the Hellmouth V Cup

Performance Chart

HellmouthVSeasonsQuantileGraph FFF.png

Summary

{{HellmouthVRankList SeasonAllTime Chron FFF}}


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