I am really shocked that there isn't a Troper Tales page for this already...at a water polo game that determined whether or not we would play at 7:30 in the morning (and have to leave our houses at five), my team was tied against the other. One of the girls got an ejection, which lasts twenty seconds, but then came back in the pool too early. The refs waved her back. Normally, my coach wouldn't contest this, but seeing as there was a minute left on the clock, we had the JV goalie in the cage, and a tied game would end in a shootout...he yelled at the ref that her entering should have given us a penalty shot. The refs turned around and talked (seriously, it was right out of a movie), then turned around and walked silently back to their positions (the refs aren't allowed to talk). Then, the ref tossed me the ball. The first part of the whistle for a five meter and the whistle for restarting the game is somewhat similar, so he blew his whistle, we held our breath, and then he put up his hand and signaled a five meter. I took it, made the shot, and we won the game.

This troper has lost count of the times that his [BloodBowl] games have come down to insane last-down plays involving improbable sequences of dice-rolls. And it seems to work as often as not... Perhaps someone better at maths at me can work out the cumulative probability of:

Dodge out of a tackle zone on 3+ (D6)

Pick up the ball, which lies in two tackle zones: 5+

Dodge back out of said TZs: 3+

Throw a pass to a team-mate on the other side of the pitch: 6

Team-mate catches said pass: 3+

Team-mate then "goes for it" to move extra squares: 2+, twice.

And if you fail, you'll ''always'' fail on the last Go For It.

(4/6)*(2/6)*(4/6)*(1/6)*(4/6)*(5/6)*(5/6) = 1.14%

This troper has seen it once in the soccer tournament of his major. At mid-time, it was 3-0 for a team. In the second half, the ''goalie'' of the other scored two times... and on the final play, the best player of said team tied the game.

How my school's football team actually won a game this year. How many of the boy's games go (except, typically, we lose).

This troper was in a city spelling contest, and on the last item was tied for first. Not feeling confident about a tie-breaker, this troper managed to pull out the win.

This troper was playing a 4,000pt Apocalypse game of {{Warhammer40,000}}, Dark Angels against Eldar, the Dark Angels held two objectives, two were contested, and the Eldar held two going into the last turn, and it all came down to the Grey Knight Grand Master charging into a 5-man Pathfinder squad that held the Eldar Vital Objective (worth two objectives) on the last turn, and the game was lost 3-2 when one Ranger made a 5+ armor save against a Holocaust psychic power, leaving them alive at above half strength and able to claim the objective.

I was watching my high school basketball team play a close game that we had been losing narrowly for much of it. A few seconds before the end, with my school's team down by 2, a player made a 3-point basket to give the team a 1-point lead. Time to celebrate... except it wasn't, because one of the players on the opposing sports team took the ball all the way down the court in the last 5 seconds and made a basket, literally right as the buzzer sounded. It was hard to even tell if the shot was made before the buzzer or not, and more complicated by the refs adding 3 seconds near the end for unclear reasons. Luckily, we got the last laugh by beating the same team in the playoffs a few weeks later.