I knew of League of Legends before I played it. It was that game my close friend played while wasted, getting at least two accounts permabanned in the process. It had that character (Teemo) who occupied the banner of an anime fansub site that I frequented on occasion. It was that game that looked pretty cool. So I started playing.

“You’re bad,” my friends said once I began to play with them, “So you should watch streams and competitive play.”

The stream I settled on was Nhat Nguyen’s support stream. Despite being an AD carry main, not only did I learn to be a better support, but I was introduced to the likes of music artists Quantic and Lemon Jelly. This wouldn’t be the last time that League of Legends affected my music tastes.

That August, I watched the IPL Pro League Face-off: San Francisco Showdown and then the Season 2 North American Regionals three weeks later at the beginning of September. In a mildly awkward awards ceremony, a Heartseeker Vayne cosplayer chanted, “TSM, TSM” at the crowd while holding a red mylar heart balloon. Behind her, TSM top laner Marcus “Dyrus” Hill, the tallest member of his team, held up a large celebratory check above his head. Mr. Pillow lay at his feet while the other four members reached as high as they could to match him. It was fun, but I wasn’t hooked.

The Season 2 World Championship was similarly infectious. I enjoyed watching every moment, chatting with friends over Skype and muting Silver Scrapes during the delays — there’s a reason why a subset of people still hate that song to this day, regardless of its now iconic status — but I was still a casual fan. No team had captured my heart.

I didn’t fall in love with competitive play until I watched MLG Dallas in 2013. An unassuming tournament in the grand scheme of things during the awkward transition period into the LCS era. One of my friends said that KT Rolster B was the team to watch in the MLG exhibition matches. I hadn’t seen much past the North American and European League Championship Series, so I didn’t understand how they could possibly beat a team like Gambit Gaming, who at the time were still highly rated as one of the best teams in the world.

Kim “Ssumday” Chan-ho’s Renekton didn’t have a single creep to his name when he killed Joedat “Voyboy” Esfahani’s Akali after a level 2 gank from Choi “inSec” In-seok.

At six and a half minutes, KT were all over Curse. InSec was back in the top lane while Yoo “Ryu” Sang-ook responded to a Brandon “Saintvicious” DiMarco gank bottom with his Teleport. For everything that Curse wanted to do, KT had an answer. For everything that Curse tried to take, KT turned it back on them and took more in the exchange. At 22 minutes, Game 1 was over.

It was incredible.

For some reason, neither Azubu Frost nor NaJin Sword had captivated me like KT Rolster B. So I prepared. I went back and watched VODs of 2012-13 OnGameNet Champions Winter. My alarm went off promptly at 4:30 a.m. for OGN Champions and I subscribed to OnGameNet’s Twitch channel, gladly paying the money to watch my team live and have access to VODs if I couldn’t make it. I began learning more about the game itself. Where KT Rolster B were strong and where they were weak, the ins and outs of their fast-push turret strategy, and I found a favorite player, KT Rolster B’s AD carry Go “Score” Dong-bin.

When MVP Ozone took out KT Rolster B in the spring quarterfinals, I was sad and surprised, but not devastated. Ozone had been the better team in that series. They later proved themselves the best team that spring, shocking Korean League of Legends fans and analysts by sweeping CJ Entus Blaze in the 2013 OGN Champions Spring finals. This contextualized the loss further. KT Rolster B had been taken out by the eventual finalist, a significantly less shameful loss.

Then came 2013 OGN Champions Summer. Lee “KaKAO” Byung-kwon joined the renamed KT Rolster Bullets, sending Ssumday over to their sister team, the Arrows. inSec rotated into the top lane and KaKAO took over the jungle. It was a one-two punch that few teams could deal with. I had fully adjusted to my 5:00 a.m./7:00 a.m. schedule. I went to work as a retail manager in the afternoon shifts, humming f(x)’s “Rum Pum Pum Pum” and APink’s “NoNoNo” under my breath, even though I didn’t know the words because the breaks in between games were filled with Korean pop music interspersed with the season’s greatest plays.

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