This article is classified "Real"
Throughout the planet (and, as well as we can guess, the Galaxy), people have created various sports with which to waste their time. Some of the more famous Earth sports include baseball, hockey, football (American), and soccer (known to all non-Americans as football). These all have complex rules and histories and boring things like that. One sport which is far from this list, and also far superior due to its minimization of the rule books, is broomball. Broomball was most likely invented by drunk Americans working their way through college as janitors. The sport involves using a broom to hit a small ball (as well as opponents) around an ice rink toward goals at either end of the ice. Broomball is very similar to hockey, but lacking in a few respects: fewer pads, fewer rules, and absolutely no skates. Footwear modified in any way to allow easy travel on the ice is forbidden. This prevents people from moving fast enough to actually kill one another, although the occasional broken bone is not uncommon. The game consists of two forty minute halves, and any ties are played out in a series of five minute sudden-death overtimes. In its modern form, broomball involves more than normal brooms; there is also a great deal of duct tape. The brooms are wrapped in the stuff until they are actually more tape than actual organic fiber. Because of the propensity of engineers to use large amounts of duct tape, it is not surprising that one of the largest broomball leagues exists on the campus of Michigan Technological University, an engineering school. It is not uncommon to tape uniquely useful and/or lucky brooms back together with upwards of a role of duct tape. Unfortunately, due to safety constraints set by university bureaucrats, helmets are now worn. This has had the pleasant affect of actually increasing the violence, however, as the players no longer fear the loss of the ability to form sentences. This has also caused the refs to call even fewer penalties, resulting in rules such as "checking from behind" being mostly ignored.