Next comes the award for third place, and they give it to The Scale Blazers, and nobody cares. Not even those poor kids from Portland, who are still laced into their goddamned skates, for Christ's sake.

And finally, we've arrived at the award for first, and I must commend them on their valiant attempt to prolong the tension, here. I must also note that their valiant attempt fails, but hey! You can't have everything, can you? McKinley High wins, and confetti cannons explode from offstage, and the children go bananas with the screaming and the hugging and the jumping up and down in slow motion, but honestly? It's Sue's silent salute from the audience that gets to yours truly. Or maybe I'm just saying that because I can't think of anything else to type about a slow-motion celebration montage that drags on for fifty full seconds of screentime.

And if you think that was a waste of time, it gets worse: Once we return from this episode's next commercial break, we get thrown into another slow-motion celebration montage, this one taking place back in the hallowed halls of dear McKinley High. They try to fake us out at the beginning, of course, with a couple of be-mulleted hockey jocks approaching the just-returning children of New Directions with what appear to be slushie-filled plastic cups, but those cups actually contain a lot more confetti, and that sets off an endless sequence of parties scored by a cover of Grouplove's "Tongue Tied," which is yet another song I don't particularly care for. In all fairness, though, parts of this bit do serve a larger purpose by tying up loose plot threads both new and old, as when Frankenteen collects his winnings from a sheepish-looking Hockey Guy Who Should Be In A Medically-Induced Coma, and when White Sue presents The Maharishi with an oversized check for ten thousand dollars, thereby successfully wresting full control of The Cheerios back from Black Sue. Oh, and at one point, while the children are spraying fake champagne on each other over in the music room, Will totally has sex with Emma back at their apartment, so I guess we won't be dealing with her boring obsessive-compulsive disorder storyline anymore. And after Idiot Rachel signs her very first actual autograph -- it's for an apparently star-struck underclassperson who's apparently twenty-five years old -- the children plus Mr. Schue place their enormous award in the music room's trophy case and stare at it for a while until...