Alverson gently pushed her to be playful, using her natural wit to turn negative feelings into positive answers. She ignored him. She especially hated this one: “Describe your favorite color to a blind man.”

“O.K., pink,” she said. “How would I know what pink is? Pink is cotton candy? Sweet and sticky? You know what this is? It’s cheesy.” Alverson shot back: “This may be cheesy, but that attitude is only going to get you another runner-up plaque.”

When they met again the next morning at 9, Sanchez seemed chastened. “I really bombed,” she said, reflecting on practice the night before. Alverson agreed: “I tried to give you the ball, and you turned it down.” (Though his daughter Blanche played pro basketball in Spain, Alverson isn’t good at sports or sports analogies.) Sanchez nodded.

The overnight turnaround encouraged Alverson. “The ones who think they know all the answers are the ones who lose,” he told me. “She’ll win Miss Louisiana. Because she’ll do the work.”

Last month, she did win. Afterward, I called Alverson to ask about her chances at Miss America. “Lacey isn’t a typical pageant girl,” he said. “Can the judges really get to know her? The first time I ever did this, the girl wasn’t supposed to do anything in the program, and she won. So we have a shot.”

This wasn’t the first time Alverson switched to “we.” For all his talk of self-expression, he clearly gets invested in seeing his clients succeed, in pageants as much as in court. “I absolutely like to win,” he said. “Even when I’m playing Tiddlywinks, I’m playing to win. Yeah, this strokes my ego. It’s seeing them learn and grow. I don’t want them to sound smart. I want them to be smart, well rounded and well informed. Sometimes, years later, the mother’s calling and saying, ‘My daughter could never have done this without you.’ It’s a woman saying: ‘You helped me as a teen, and now I’m having a med-school interview. Could we talk for 10 minutes?’ One girl said to me, ‘I will never have it exactly right.’ I said: ‘Not until the day you die, honey. None of us will. But we’re always improving.’ ”