For the past week, my inner four-year-old has been jumping up and down like she is hiked up on sugar. Why? Because she wants to be the very best, like no one ever was! See, I was roughly four when Pokémon first came to American TV, and that show was kiddy-crack for me and my older brother. Our parents and older sister were fed up with the show within the year because of how much we were into it. So imagine being 22 and finding out that FINALLY I too can travel across the land (at least my neighborhood and surrounding areas) to catch ‘em all after 16 years of waiting. Then imagine finding out all your friends are on the game too! Cool, you can play together! You can be on the same team even! Wait…oh snap, you are #TeamMystic in the land of #TeamValor. How did this happen? There are the occasional #TeamInstinct players, but they are few and far between (and not always very competitive in your area). What’s there to do? The answer is simple, team up with team red and banter with each other while walking around for three hours. Or at least that’s what I did with one of my best friends.

Thankfully for me, I have bowling friends. Now for those of you who haven’t read a lot by me, you might want to check out this piece I wrote on Why Bowling Is So Much More Than A Sport. This goes along with the theme in that article that bowling friends become more like family the more time you spend with them. One of the reasons behind that is because we get to where we can trash talk each other like siblings and come out of competition with friendships intact, even if the ego is bruised. For my friend Jess (the lovely model seen with a Poliwag at the top of this article) this is all too true. Not only are we on rival teams in college bowling, but also in Pokémon Go, so the banter becomes brilliant between us.

This past week she and I took an afternoon to go to church together. Not for the service, but because that church has three gyms and roughly two dozen stops on its grounds for Pokémon Go. Most of the three hours we spent searching for Pokémon we spoke about various things, work, bowling, Hamilton, and tricks we’d been finding online for the game. Throughout the day we caught quite a few Pokémon, and even hatched one or two eggs each. But the biggest thing that impressed me was the amount of other people out looking for Pokémon. There were several couples, a few solo people, but at least two families that we passed. The amazing part? Everyone was helping find Pokémon. Now, I’m not a member of this church, but I see it whenever I visit my grandmother who lives in the nursing home across the street. I’ve never seen this many people outside the church, especially in the type of heat we’ve been having. I’m simply floored that not only are we 90’s babies getting to live our childhood dreams, but that we’re able to bring the next generation of Poke Masters up with the thing we always dreamed of.