O-U-C-H That hurts

This was not going as planned, sitting as I was in the comfortable environs of a Brookline living room staring at a Scrabble rack holding two ''N's," three ''I's," an ''F," and a ''W." Unless ''winnifi" is a word, I was in a world of pain.

More to the point, I was staring across the Scrabble board at Aaron Jacobs and Nathan Mendelsohn, a pair of Brookline eighth-graders who had just won the National School Scrabble Championship a few days before.

Cute. Very cute. They'd beaten a bunch of early adolescents to capture the title and the $5,000 prize that went with it. Congrats, kids. Now let's see how you fare against someone who makes his living with the English language.

I don't like to brag, but I've spent a career with my fingers dancing across a keyboard, and I'm not talking about a piano. Words is my business. And when you put a Scrabble board in front of me, I've been known to score somewhere north of 300 points.

In other words, it was time to put a couple of pencil-necked Scrabble geeks in their inconsequential little place.

First thing I noticed was that they weren't pencil-necked Scrabble geeks at all. Actually, Aaron Jacobs and Nathan Mendelsohn are a couple of poised and personable teenagers. They play sports. They play jazz. They know how to laugh. But they were also the enemy, and I wasn't going to let their good nature get in the way.

We sat down to one of those fancy boards that spin around and hold the tiles in place. Aaron's mother laid down a plate of cookies (Mmmm, chocolate chip). And we were off.

They made the word ''ODEA" to start the game. It means a roofed theater in ancient Greece and Rome, but they didn't know that and, at the time, neither did I. I placed an ''L" over the ''A" and made ''LA" and ''LINK" for 12 points. I didn't like where this was headed one bit.

They made words on top of words, sometimes four at a time, most of which I'm fairly sure have never been used in an actual sentence.

They had a nose for double- and triple-word squares like a French pig has for truffles.

At one point, they laid down a mere two letters to make ''MAE," ''UM," ''TA," and ''DE," for 28 points. I followed with ''LAIR," which got me a grand total of five.

They bantered with each other easily, talking about ''bingos" and ''fishing," the former referring to using all seven of their letters to make a word, the latter meaning to play a single letter in hopes of picking up another that they needed. They joked with Aaron's younger sister, Rosie, who kept taking the cookies that I thought were mine.

Meantime, I bore down on a rack that contained ''N N U V H F R" and wondered if it would be unsportsmanlike to fling my letters across the room. I ultimately decided it would.

By the time they spelled out ''OUTDOES" and ''ALLOYS" in a single move, with a 50-point bingo bonus, the game was officially out of hand. The only word I really wanted to make was ''BRATS," but alas, I didn't have a ''B." Maybe it worked just as well without it.

Final score: Aaron and Nathan, 382. Your newly humbled correspondent, 222.

Afterward, Nathan matter-of-factly said, ''Aaron is easily the head man here," but I'm not so sure that's right. They help each other make words. They finish each other's sentences. Aaron just happens to have about 50,000 otherwise useless words stored in his agile brain for the sole purpose of Scrabble games.

For kicks, he overturned seven random letters in front of him -- ''I S A T R N E" -- and told me to add an eighth. I gave him a ''G."

He casually proceeded to make ''ANGRIEST," ''RANGIEST," ''GANISTER," ''GANTRIES," ''INGRATES," and ''GRANITES."

I walked out that door realizing I never had a chance. Maybe somewhere there's a kindergarten Candy Land champion that I can take.

Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.