In early 2010, my friend and I went on a date to Madison Square Garden to watch an NBA game. However, after one quarter of New York Knicks (her favourite) dominating Toronto Raptors (the team I was suddenly the most ardent fan of), we realized we’d rather just talk – and left the game to go to a restaurant. I had a then-new iPhone 3GS, she carried a work-assigned BlackBerry. We made fun of each other’s smartphone choices, as nerds do – and focused a lot on keyboards, as nerds used to do: BlackBerry’s was physical, but annoying; iPhone’s was flexible, but barely a keyboard.
At some point, mid-dinner, I was curious how the game was doing, so I went to Google to look it up. To our surprise, the score was now 80-something to 80-something. All the advantage Knicks once had was gone. It was now head to head, the winner changing every minute. We watched it towards the end – assuming you count refreshing a website every 10 seconds as watching. In the end, against all the early odds, the Raptors won: