Real College Lacrosse Name Or Fake College Lacrosse Name: The Quiz

There is no meaningful way in which our current moment can be truthfully described as a golden age, or at least not as we usually understand the term. If we open the definition up some—like, wide enough that we can describe the 14th century as a Golden Age For The Bubonic Plague—we could maybe manage it, but if we stick to the understanding of gold as a valuable thing that is good to have, then ours is no golden age. Everything ascendant is anxious and dark, and so much of what we have long held valuable is now scarce and tarnished or smeared lustily with something gross, difficult to identify, and alarmingly fragrant. It's an anxious and inward and unsatisfied time, a time of forgetting and falling down. And yet: despite that, or perhaps because of it, we are in a golden age of sports names.

In a world defined by how occluded and foreclosed it is, aspirational sports names—the sort of sports names that suggest white-shoe accounting firms or people swaddled in wealth and privilege so profound that they can only think about boats—are a sort of wishcasting. They're expressive both of the aspirations of people bestowing those names on their kids and of the anxieties that undergird and undermine those aspirations. In their willful poshness, these names read as attempts to hand an insulating veneer of comfort to babies being born into a world shot through and sinking with discomfort and uncertainty. Seen this way, there is something poignant about these names; they are acts of love and desperate hope, every goofy one of them. Of course they look weird; the harder things get, the harder these names have to work.

So clearly the thing to do is to make some doofy quiz built around the insane boatshoe names that are especially easy to find in college lacrosse. Or, anyway, that seemed clear to me.

And so that is what we have done here. The real names were taken from this year's version of InsideLacrosse.com's indispensable All-Name Team; I used both the men's and women's teams. A few unbelievably fantastic names were left out of the quiz because they appeared in last year's version of this. I mention this only because it would be malpractice not to use the name "Brewster Warble"—real, and spectacular—for any other reason than I had done so previously. It is, like so many of these names, more beautiful and more perfect than anything I could have created. It is, as you will see, not remotely alone in that. Good luck.

1. Duckworth Wentworth

2. Font Dampney

3. Brickman House

4. Wisper Turmerick

5. Rich Mix

6. Glade Nugent

7. Tangerine Bennes

8. Troute Gingham

9. Jameson Buttafuoco

10. Viper Scheele

11. IV Stuckey

12. Oaks Vanderpump

13. Mincey Trellis

14. Cougar Kirby

15. Bunt Raddison

16. Sky Hyatt

17. Winnie Brandfield-Harvey

18. Emerson Lakin-Palmer

19. Holden Rosen Grupp

20. Kristian Wheat

21. Airie Saint Cloud

22. Declan Swartwood

The answers are under this picture of a proud, patient dog.

Answers:

Real: 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 17, 19, 22

Probably Not Real: 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 12, 13, 15, 18, 20, 21