Alewife-Boylston Rivalry

motto

BB: Ex Medio Omnia

Translation: "From the Center, Everything."

AA: Ex finibus ignis

Translation: "From the Ends, Fire."

alewife originals

The Pirate Radio Jam: In a pivotal match for the MTA Crown, the Boogers, appalled by the low-fidelity nature of the Arsonists' fan culture, attempted to "jam" The Brakeman's pirate radio signal. They didn't use technology; they broadcasted a live, avant-garde poetry reading on the same frequency. The plan backfired spectacularly. The discordant noise and abstract imagery of the poetry only fed the Arsonists' chaotic gestalt, causing their patterns to evolve in beautiful, terrifyingly unpredictable ways, leading to an infamous victory known to Alewife fans as "The Howl."

An Echo of Shared Trauma: Their linked origin in the great 90s blackout defines their interactions. The Arsonists were born of heat and rage in a stalled train. The Boogers were born of cold and dread in a damp tunnel. When they play, this polarity manifests on the grid. Arsonist patterns raise the metaphysical "temperature" of the game, causing opponents' patterns to become brittle. Booger patterns generate a "dampness," causing opponents to become sluggish and bogged down in a virtual slime.

The "Cartographical Defamation": The modern rivalry’s "First Burn" was not ignited by a match, but by a mosaic. In a grand act of civic arrogance, the Boylston Boogers unveiled a massive, permanent tile map in their station. Commissioned from Bartholomew Peabody Finch, a celebrated (and notoriously smug) artist from Wellesley, the piece was a masterpiece of passive aggression. It depicted the Green Line as a thick, vibrant artery of emerald and gold tile, pulsing with life. In stark contrast, the Red Line was rendered as a thin, pathetic capillary of cracked crimson ceramic that withered and fizzled into a gray, featureless smudge at Alewife. This public insult, the "Cartographical Defamation," was the moment the "GO BACK TO WELLESLEY!" chant was first spat in fury.

alewife lore

boylston lore

The Cartographic Defamation

Goober Boylston (no relation) is an architecture critic for the Boston Tribune and the unofficial spokesperson for the Boylston Boogers. Goober primarily writes sports columns for the Boston Tribune, but insists that "architecture critic" is his "real" title.

mta crown backstory

The Architectural Heresy: The rivalry is an aesthetic holy war. Boylston, one of the oldest stations, is a landmark of historic tile and wrought iron. Alewife is a modern (1985) concrete cathedral of Brutalism. The Boogers see Alewife as a soulless, monstrous parking garage with a subway attached. The Arsonists see Boylston as a cramped, crumbling, inefficient relic for tourists. This feud exploded when a Booger-sympathizing architecture critic called Alewife "a monument to despair," and in retaliation, the Arsonists' patterns began mimicking the cracks in Boylston's ancient tilework, a deep and personal insult.

End of the Line vs. Center of the Universe: This is the core of their philosophical divide. The Arsonists are "End-of-the-Liners," their identity forged at the terminal point where the city frays into swampland. Their patterns start at the grid's edge and burn inward. The Boogers, whose station opens onto the Boston Common, are "Centrists" who believe they are the hub of existence. Their patterns emerge in the center and expand outward, often collapsing when they touch the "unimportant" edges of the grid.

Hellmouth Cup

Season 14

The First Miracle: The flip side of the Arsonists story about The Cartographic Defamation is the Boylston Boogers doing what they do so well: getting under their cross-town rivals' skin and getting into their heads, living there rent-free throughout the pre-season, regular season, and postseason. The Boogers flawlessly executed a campaign of psychological warfare designed to set the tone.

The Boogers couldn't believe their luck when they landed their dream matchup against the Arsonists in their first season of existence. The Arsonists, who had already been in existence for 14 seasons of the Hellmouth Cup and know the Boogers when the Boogers were still in grade school, resented the matchup and saw it as an insult - they were a major league team, being forced to match up against a troupe of minor leaguers, in their first year of existence, on the biggest stage. They resented the Boogers because the Boogers had successfully gotten into their heads.

That's exactly how the Boogers ended up winning the first-ever postseason matchup between the two bitter rivals, lighting the match of the bitterest rivalry in Golly.

Season 23

The Ghost Run and The Sauna

Season 23: The Ghost Run: The Boylston Boogers had been not just beaten but swept by the Delaware Corporate Shells in their Season 15 postseason exit, so the Boogers came prepared this time. They tapped into an unusual source of power for their Division Series match: the abandoned outer track at Boylston station. Legend says the collective reactivated dormant, chaotic automata left decaying in those tunnels since the station's opening in 1897. They unleashed unpredictable "ghost train" spaceships that the hyper-focused Shells never noticed until it was too late. It was a dangerous gamble that paid off for Boylston, drawing on the city's forgotten underbelly to power through the Shells.

The Boogers' ghost train spaceship magic continued against the Albuquerque Solarpunks , another recent Hellmouth Cup expansion team that had shown great promise in their early years, only to be bushwhacked by the ghost train spaceship patterns that Boylston let loose (or rather, that let themselves loose, as Boylston no longer had control of the spirits driving the ghost trains). The high-and-dry Punks were swamped.

Season 23: The Sauna: The championship victory against the Long Beach Flightless Birds was not clean. Both teams agreed ahead of time to hold the match in a sauna, allowing the Boogers to tap into their natural "moist" aura, while giving the Flightless Birds the chance to smooth talk their way around the Boogers and to a Hellmouth Cup. The Boogers, thriving int he damp, high-pressure environment, were a slippery opponent, but so were the slick Birds - known throughout the league for their fast thinking and smooth talking, it was nearly impossible to corner them.

But as the series wore on, the air grew thick, the patterns slowed, and the Flightless Birds were too waterlogged to go on. The Boogers didn't outplay them, they seeped into every crack in their defenses, a victory of pervasive dampness that was both triumphant and vaguely unsettling - like finding mold in a beautiful painting.

Toroidal Cup

TCS: S4: BB > LBFB

Season 4: Winds of Fate: (Maximum Double Choke bringing the Birds and Boogers together)

Season 4: Boylston Tide: The first and only Toroidal Cup victory of the Boogers happened in Toroidal/Season 4. It was remembered by the Boogers as a dirty victory, and by the Birds as a bucket of cold water soaking them to the bone. Legend has it that Boylston embraced their "MOIST" power word, propelled themselves into semi-liquid and unpredictable tide formations, and eventually overpowered the Flightless Birds. A messy 7-game series was back-and-forth, back-and-forth, ending with a desperate Game 7 gambit by Boylston that saw them grab the lead and never look back. The Boogers clinched a wet and sticky victory that Goober Boylston rambled on about for nearly 5,000 words in the next day's newspaper column.

TCS: S8: War of the Pothole

AA: War of the Pothole

TCS: S11: heist, LBFB > BB

Season 11: The Tides of Long Beach: In a Cup series rematch that was quickly becoming popular, the Birds and Boogers faced off in another Cup series in Toroidal/Season 11. Determined to spoil the potential rematch of the first-ever Hellmouth Cup series (Birds vs Boat Shoes), the Boogers powered past the Boat Shoes to clinch the pennant and face off against the Flightless Birds.

The Boogers came in hot, trouncing the Flightless Birds in 3 straight games. It was even rumored that after Game 3, the Boogers began to clear space on the shelf of the team clubhouse where the Toroidal/Season 11 Cup would go. But the Flightless Birds bounced back, digging deep in Game 4 to come away with the victory. Three Triple Doubles later, the series was all tied up.

Game 7 of the Toroidal/Season 11 was as short as it was stunning. The Birds hit hard out of the gate, grabbed the lead, and made short work of the Boogers. Far from the Game 7 vibe the crowd was expecting, the match was practically over before most fans were in their seats. By the end of the match, Birds fans were flocking onto the field, while Boogers fans (who could not watch the game live due to local blackout restrictions) would learn of the disastrous Game 7 the next day in Goober Boylston's newspaper column.

Season 14: Boogers-Birds Double Denial: Toroidal/Season 14 saw the tantalizing possibility of another Birds-Boogers matchup, with the Birds facing off against the Animals and the Boogers facing the Corporate Shells. But in a dose of double disappointment, both Birds and Boogers were knocked out.

(LBFB: Double Reversal in the LCS, S11/S12 with SLC and S13/S14 with SDBA)

TCS: S15/S17: #1 Seed Collapse

Season 15: #1 Seed Collapse: While the Toroidal/Season 15 Hot League Division Series will live in infamy thanks to The 159-158 Game, across the league the Boogers and Grape Chews were having a consequential Division Series matchup of their own. The Boogers, who were known throughout the league for bragging about their Toroidal/Season 4 Cup, as well as the near-miss of their Toroidal/Season 11 series loss, had come in as the #1 seed expecting to crush the Grape Chews. Their formations were too cute by half, and their arrogance led them to attempt overly ornate patterns that couldn't be controlled. The Chews ended up dispatching the Boogers in Game 4, teaching the Boogers a lesson about hubris.

Season 17: #1 Seed Collapse: In Toroidal/Season 17 the Boogers faced off against the Flamingos, and it became clear to everyone that the Boogers had learned no lessons about hubris. The Boogers continued to brag about their Toroidal/Season 4 Cup, their Toroidal/Season 11 near-miss, and even began bragging about how lucky the Grape Chews had been to pull off their Toroidal/Season 15 victory over the Boogers.

The Boogers quickly notched a 2-game lead over the Flamingos. But it was the last time they would hold the lead in a game. In a rapid 3-game set, the Flamingos diced the boogers into bits, including a whirlwind Game 5 where they whipped Boylston and only needed the minimum number of generations to do it.

Season 20: Swamp Ass: The Season 20 Hot League Division Series matchup between ORL and BB can only be described with two words: hot, and wet. In an unexpected battle of endurance and moisture-wicking ability, the Boogers and Business Majors took the series to the max Game 5. The Boogers were heartbroken from many seasons of seeing opportunities slip through their fingers, and were determined to take the series. But the day was unexpectedly humid, and the Boogers began to wilt like lettuce. In a critical mistake, the Boogers took a breather halfway through the game to deal with a severe case of swamp ass, and the Business Majors took advantage, planted a huge formation, and swamped the entire left half of the grid, taking Game 5 and the series win.

Rainbow Cup

AA:

Season 7: Revenge of the Swamp Ass: The Boogers' Rainbow/Season 7 Cup victory is the stuff of legend, a title won through cunning rather than dominance. They clinched the pennant by finishing second to Orlando, a move Goober Boylston praised as "a masterful use of negative space in the grand architecture of victory." The lore states the Boogers intentionally let the Business Majors exhaust their most vibrant, high-energy patterns in the pennant race. Then, in the Cup Series, the Boogers unleashed their full, "moist" spectrum of conserved automata, winning the war by strategically losing a single, decisive battle.

Season 12: Coattail Pennant: (Arsonists getting second place in LCS to Boogers was the big humiliation, no salute. Boogers same, but reverse. They just want to beat the Arsonists, Arsonists just want to beat them, punch and judy show, except the Arsonists got their asses kicked.

(Yeah, we need to rewrite the whole Coattail Pennant thing, it's opposite. Alewife WON that pennant in a tight match between those two teams. And then got their asses kicked in the Rainbow Cup, left in the dust by said team.)

Boylston: Coattail Pennant, Boylston Rainbow Beatdown (known to both teams as simply The Series)

Alewife: The Red Pennant, Boylston Rainbow Beatdown (The Series)

Season 13: Unleashing a Monster: Realizing they had lit a fire that could not be extinguished, created a monster that would rampage its way to a Rainbow up series victory

Klein Cup

Season 3: The Red Line Robbery: Red Line Robbery

Season 3: The Perfect Season and The Mapparium Controversy: The Boogers' dominant championship run in Klein/Season 3 is known in Boylston as "The Perfect Season." The Boogers had installed a dome within Boylston Street Station that, like visitors inside Boston's famous inside-out glass globe, allowed the Boogers to see the entire grid from a perfect, central vantage point. Their exceptional visibility into all parts of the grid, unbeknownst to their opponents, gave them an edge: the ability to see everywhere all at once. Ex Medio Omnia was, for a season, a literal truth.

The Boogers used their advantage to crush the Chews in the Division Series, and execute the legendary Red Line Robbery. Finally, they had a shot at their old Cup series rivals, the Flightless Birds, and they did not miss. In tying a perfect bow on The Perfect Season, the Boogers beat the Birds with 4 straight wins in 5 games.

But in an offhanded coment at a press conference, the Boogers revealed the existence of The Mapparium, and the Alewife Arsonists, led by the mysterious Brake Master Cylinder, sparked a media firestorm, a controversy calling into question the Boogers' championship, just as their Perfect Season was drawing to its perfect close.

"The Arsonists Demand An Asterisk" became a rallying cry for Alewife fans, who demanded at the very least an asterisk on the Klein/Season 3 Cup victory, and even went so far as to say the Cup should be forcibly removed from Boylston Street Station and shipped cross-country to Long Beach.

And to the surprise of exactly no one, that is exactly what happened. One morning, as the Flightless Birds were preparing for their morning practice in preparation for Klein/Season 4, someone noticed a large object fixed to the top of the scoreboard. It was the Klein Cup, lifted and shifted from Boylston to Long Beach.

To this day, no one knows how the heist was pulled off, but the mysterious Brake Master Cylinder refuses to discuss the subject and will break into a musical number anytime anyone brings it up.

...

Season 13: A Long Walk Through A Blizzard: The Salt Lake Turbulence had been swept in the Klein/Season 12 series by the Flamingos, and were hungry. The Boogers were unprepared for the wall of ice that hit them in Game 1. They mustered a single win against the Turbulence, but endured A Walk Through A Blizzard ( 93abb0f5-f311-4806-9071-0ffb1896765f) - an 8,000 generation match where the Boogers were left in deep freeze while the Turbulence, whose victory was never in doubt, played with their food and forced the Boogers to endure a long and drawn-out loss on their road to a Klein Cup series defeat.

Season 13 (Goober's Take): A Failure of Altitude: In his column after the S13 Finals collapse, Goober Boylston refused to blame the team's patterns. Instead, he wrote a treatise titled "On Topographical Incompatibility." He argued that the Boogers' "moist," sea-level automata were architecturally unsuited for the "high-altitude, desiccated logic" of the Salt Lake Turbulence. It was not a loss, he claimed, but "a predictable environmental reaction," like trying to build a wetland in the middle of a salt flat.

Season 3 vs. Season 24: The Bird's Long Memory: The two finals against the Long Beach Flightless Birds tell a complete story. In S3, the Boogers were masters of the Klein bottle's confusing space, winning 4-1. But for the next 21 seasons, the Flightless Birds were studying, learning to navigate the non-orientable passages. The 4-3 loss in S24 was the ultimate lesson: the Boogers thought they owned the structure, but the Birds had spent two decades learning its blueprints. It was a victory of patience over talent.

Season 22: The Scam: Delaware Corporate Shells defeated the Boogers 4-2 in the League Championship Series as part of what the Boogers describe as a "scam" and "rug-pulling" but Corporate Shells lawyers describe as "a completely ordinary and normal transaction, totally in line with the contract, subject to amendments that were agreed upon by both parties prior to the start of the Series."

The controversy was not uncovered until several matches, which the Boogers claimed they won, showed up in the next day's Goober Boylston column being reported backwards - the Corporate Shells took the winning score of the Boogers, while the Boogers took the paltry losing scores of the Corporate Shells. By the time the team realized what had happened, it was too late: the pennant had been handed over to the Corporate Shells, who promptly made a fortune throwing the Klein Cup series to the Tucson Butchers in a matchup (the Bateman Series, a.k.a. the American Psycho Crown) that was every bookie's dream.

Many believe it inadvertently cursed the Flightless Birds, who were widely panned by Birds fans in Klein/Season 4 as one of the least interesting teams in recent Long Beach Flightless Birds history.

Hellmouth II Cup

Season 6: Compliance Failure: Southbound Crown faceoff in the Championship Series. The loss to OSHA Violations was a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the enemy. The emphasis on structure and scaffolding was undermined at every turn by the Violations, who made the structure radically less stable, ran rogue electrical currents that filled wires with more juice than they were rated for, and made very creative use of some wooden planks found somewhere deep in the bowels of Boylston Street Station. The result was equal parts ephemeral art installation and OSHA Violations victory.

Season 11: The Big Digger: The Boogers' dominant championship is known colloquially as "The Big Digger." Their postseason run was a messy, brutal project that everyone just wanted to be over, a long-overbudget and long-overdue project that the Boogers had to land, somehow, to save the team from financial ruin.

The two sweeps to reach the finals were the chaotic tunneling phase, blasting through old rivals who had previously blocked their path. The grueling 4-3 victory over the Tucson Butchers was the final, beautiful Zakim Bridge emerging from the chaos - a testament to the idea that sometimes the most elegant structures rise from the ugliest, most arduous work.

Seasons 14 & 19 (Goober's Spin): Foundational Issues: After the second #1 seed collapse, Goober Boylston (no relation) seemed unhappy with the league. In columns that were actually read by exactly zero percent of fans, titled (respectively) "On Preliminary Load-Bearing Assessments" and "The Mystique of Amorphous Loss," it was argued that the fault lay in the structure of the postseason itself. He claimed the team's complex, year-long architectural project was... well, nobody actually read the columns, so who really knows what was said, or might have been said.

Seasons 6 and 11: Becoming Trained Vampire Handlers:The difference between the tough 3-2 win over Vegas in S6 and the dominant 4-0 sweep in S11 is a key part of the Boogers' evolution. In S6, they struggled against the Vampires' life-draining patterns. But after Season 6, realizing the Vampires had exposed a "soft spot," they began specialized "Vampire Handler" training to counter the life-draining patterns. By S11, they had developed sharp counterpatterns for the Vampires. The moist patterns of the Boogers became "Holy Water"-infused snot strands - long, pure strands stretching across the entire grid, repelling the chaotic anti-life energy of the Vampires and driving them back into the shadows of the neon lights of Vegas.

Gold Diggers: After four championships across four different cups, the Boogers have never successfully defended a title or even come close in the following season. This has created the ultimate Boogers curse: they are a collective built to dig for gold - not build the mine. Their motto Ex Medio Omnia is only true in the moments of digging, and focusing, and digging deeper: once they've finally found what they're digging for, they immediately lose focus, leading to an immediate, inevitable fall.

Hellmouth III Cup

Season 7: The Not Perfect Season: This season is the Boogers’ great, painful epic. They overcame the chaos of the OSHA Violations, then won a legendary 7-game war against their arch-rivals, the Alewife Arsonists, for the pennant. With dreams of a repeat of their Klein/Season 3 Perfect Season, where they defeated the Arsonists for the pennant and went on to win the Cup series, Boylston was convinced the Cup was theirs.

The subsequent 3-4 loss in the Finals to the Sacramento Boot Lickers cut deep, leading to whispers that the Boogers seemed to be tempting fate and attempting the unthinkable by creating a new Boston-based sports curse.

Season 8: The Green Line Exorcism. Bostonians do not take talk of a sports curse lightly, so when the Boogers collective caught wind of the rumors of a curse, they responded forcefully. Fueled by rage and memory, the Boogers achieved a state of terrifying focus. Their victories over Delaware and Fargo were methodical, but the 4-0 sweep of Phoenix in the Finals was a classic "crush and flush", where the Boogers closed out the series victory by flushing Phoenix into the Back Bay. It was more than a Cup victory: it was an annihilation of any talk of a Boylston-based curse.

...

Season 18: The Ultimate Humiliation.' This is the darkest chapter in the rivalry. To be the #1 seed and get swept by the Alewife Arsonists is an unforgivable sin. The lore says the Boogers' motto, Ex Medio Omnia, became a fatal weakness. Their patterns were so proud and centralized that the Arsonists simply lit a conceptual fire around the periphery. The Boogers, too arrogant to break their own perfect formation, suffocated on their own smoke, their grand architecture collapsing inward without a single wall being breached from the outside.

Season 24: The Final, Absurd Insult. After the epic tragedy of the S18 Arsonists sweep, being swept as the #1 seed by the Jersey OSHA Violations was pure cosmic farce. The loss wasn't a tragedy; it was a punchline. The Violations didn't win with a plan; they won because their cascade of failures somehow, against all odds, perfectly intersected and dismantled the Boogers' ordered patterns. It proved a horrifying truth: the universe doesn't just have it in for the Boogers; it has a deeply ironic sense of humor.

The Hellmouth III #1 Seed Flu: This era cemented the Boogers' most famous and painful curse. In S14, S18, and S24 they collapsed as the top seed - #1 seeded team - top of the league, straight to the showers and an early end to the season. Goober Boylston has argued repeatedly in his column that it is a problem of "getting the flu, with bad timing, on a few occaions." The mysterious Brake Master Cylinder, whose opinion (the Boogers will point out) no one asked for, claims the whole thing smacks of Choke Artistry.

Hellmouth IV Cup

Hellmouth V Cup

etc.

BB-SFBS-LBFB:

HCS S23 (BB beat the ABQ in pennant, they faced the LBFB)
HCS S24 (BB lost to SFBS in pennant, they faced the LBFB)
TCS S14 (BB beat the SFBS in pennant, they faced the LBFB)

BB-DET-LBFB:

TCS S4 (BB beat DET in pennant, faced LBFB)
KCS S24 (BB beat DET in pennant, faced LBFB)

User:Ch4zm/July 2025/Boylston Lore Jam

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