Mona Shah remembers the day her boyfriend came to her sheepishly and uttered the dreaded words: I have something to tell you.

Her stomach dropped.

Oh, no, here it comes, she thought.

I do this thing once a month, he went on.

I’m scared, she thought.

I’m in… he boldly continued… a pinball league.

He then went on to divulge that he was in fact once crowned a pinball wizard.

It was 1979. He was 13. One day, after his paper route, he went to his neighborhood 7-Eleven on the southwest side of Chicago to unwind with a Slurpee and ended up posting a high score on the Star Trek pinball machine (with Spock and Kirk looking on). The score stood for one month, winning him a Pinball Wizard T-shirt and the envy of kids who, for the next six months, tried to throw him off his throne.

Not only was Mona OK with his childhood secret, she asked if she could go along to his next tournament.

That was three years ago.

Today she and Paul Anderson are married and hard core members of the Orange County Pinball League, a throwback to the days when kids hung out at pizza parlors and bowling alleys, before video games took over the planet, turning children into zombies in their own homes.

The league meets for a tournament the first Sunday of every month. In February it was at Bill Ung’s house in Fountain Valley. Ung has 15 machines that have replaced the furniture in two rooms. Cyclone. Funhouse. Earthshaker. Creature from the Black Lagoon. Attack from Mars. Revenge from Mars.

When I got to the house, police sirens were spinning. Boogiemen were dancing. Flying saucers were shooting strobe lights. Buzzers were buzzing. Bells were ringing. And the place was packed with children of the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.

The league keeps track of points to crown a winner each year. They also report their scores to the International Flipper Pinball Association, which ranks players from 48 sanctioned leagues throughout the world. The OC’s highest ranked player is Jim Belsito, who is currently No. 14 in the world and once climbed to the lofty peaks of No. 9.

Anderson, a reporter for City News Service, remembers playing against Belsito at the very first league tournament he went to back in 2007.

“Some of my old mojo was coming back,” he recalls. “I was starting to feel like a kid again. Everyone was gathering around to watch the new guy.”

Then Belsito stepped up to take his turn — and proceeded to destroy Anderson’s score.

“It’s like watching Babe Ruth at batting practice,” Anderson says. “It’s just so effortless.”

Belsito wasn’t there for the February tournament (he later told me in a phone call to his Murrieta home that his wife wants him to cut back on the pinball). But Anderson says he has witnessed Belsito calmly hold several balls with one flipper while working another ball with the other flipper.

“He’s the Mozart of pinball,” Anderson says.

Bob Matthews isn’t far behind. At 57 and retired from the insurance business, he is No. 29 in the world. He arrived at the February tournament wearing fingerless bike gloves to cushion the heels of his hands from the impact of pounding on the flipper buttons.

Bob Tucker doesn’t have a world ranking, but probably only because he doesn’t travel to tournaments, which is really the only way to amass enough points (Belsito has gone as far as London).

If Belsito is Mozart. Tucker is Jimi Hendrix. He remembers standing on a chair to play pinball at Shakey’s Pizza when he was 4. If you win three levels of play, you get a replay. He could stay at a machine all day on one dime.

He figures that from the age of 12 to 42, he played eight hours a day, at least. In the ’80s, he was the high scorer on machines from Long Beach to Southern Hills Golfland in Stanton. When bowling alleys and arcades closed their doors, he hit the all night 7-Elevens.

I asked what he does for a living that he can play so much pinball.

“I’m retired,” he told me without going into detail.

Tucker, who has a gentle smile and long strawberry blond hair parted in the middle, now plays about three hours a day, mostly on the 18 machines at his Cypress home.

So, what’s the attraction?

“It’s very interactive,” Tucker says after some thought. “Every single ball and game is completely different.”

Belsito, an electrical engineer who makes a living off coin operated games, owns 140 pinball machines, including a Tommy from The Who’s rock opera about a pinball wizard. Eighteen are set up in his house.

“I used to have more before I was married,” he said, but was quick to add: “She’s very tolerant, I must say.”

He loves how each machine tells a story.

Ung, a software engineer for IBM who wears his hair in a pony tail, guesses he has spent more than $40,000 buying games since he started playing in high school back in ’86. I asked if his fiance is on board with a house full of pinball machines.

“We have talked about that,” he says. “She’s totally on board.”

It’s not just that the machines are fun and challenging to play, he says, but “between the artwork, the humor, the sounds … there’s so much to love about them.”

Pinball companies took a big leap forward in the ’90s, building bigger ramps and multilevel playing fields and using more sophisticated technology to make, for instance, the creepy ventriloquist dummy head inside Funhouse tell you he’s mad when you nail him in the mouth with a steel ball. (“I’m not happy!”).

Ron Burkard, though, ventures to guess that the attraction they all share is part nostalgia, part OCD.

Burkard, now 42 and a financial planner, played pinball as a kid back in the ’80s in Montauk, N.Y. When he first heard about the league, he and his wife Angi were skeptical.

“We thought it was gonna be people in their moms’ basements with fluorescent lights,” he says.

They arrived at a rad loft in Long Beach with more than 60 pinball machines.

“We left nine hours later, exhausted and thrilled,” he says. “Since then, we’ve become addicted. All the flashing lights and the buzzers and the bells. It’s fun. I think everyone here is a little kid at heart.”

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Contact the writer: 714-932-1705 or lbasheda@ocregister.com