Gentle reader, meet the Alien Lighter, recently rescued from safekeeping at my father’s house in New Jersey. This little piece of kitsch is, believe it or not, one of my most valued possessions; read on and learn its secrets.

I first met the Alien Lighter as a freshman debate geek at NYU, by way of its then-owner Chris Porcaro. Chris was one of the most outsized personalities I’ve ever encountered: A senior and the top debater on the circuit that year, tall and lanky with a wild mane of red hair falling past his shoulders (though usually bound in a ponytale for rounds), and a savage, snarky wit that might have made him unbearable if it weren’t for the fact that its targets invariably ended up laughing along with him. Some people—I’ve known a few—are just born debaters: Swaying a crowd comes naturally to them. Chris was not one of these. He once told me that his first debate had gone so badly he’d ended the round in tears. But with the same frenetic intensity he brought to everything, he spent hours in front of the mirror, honing his delivery, polishing his comebacks, making the incredible effort necessary to create an illusion of effortlessness.

Now, maybe it’s just because he was such a phenomenal debater, or maybe it’s because he didn’t want to let on how hard he’d had to work to become one, but Chris adopted an incredibly cocky persona on the debate circuit. And one element of this was his practice of slamming that tacky alien-shaped lighter on the podium before each round, as a challenge to his opponents: If you could beat Chris, you could claim the Alien Lighter as your trophy.

Inevitably, of course, someone finally did take it. A couple of young hotshots named Dave and Laurence from the juggernaut Princeton team—who would go on to be the top team on the circuit two years later—won an upset victory, and it was too late in the year for Chris to have a chance to get it back before graduating. That lighter would hold a hallowed place in the trophy case of the Whig Clio Society for years, while the NYU debaters Chris had trained struggled in vain to win it back whenever a pair of us would meet Dave and Laurence in a round. But we were always outmatched.

Chris, meanwhile, had gone on to study law at Berkley’s Boalt Hall. He wouldn’t get to finish his degree. Early in his second year, he was diagnosed with a rare and inoperable brain tumor. I saw him a few months later in New York, emaciated and bald from chemotherapy, but with an impossible buoyancy that mocked his failing body, cracking jokes about whether he could use his status as “cancer boy” to pick up girls. In 2000, at the age of 23, he died.

The national championships the following year (“Nats” to the geekerati) were held at Bryn Mawr college, and my partner Amy and I had grown into strong debaters. But—and I hope Amy will forgive me for saying it—Dave and Laurence were still much better. When we found ourselves matched against them in the quarterfinal round, just about everyone expected them to steamroll over us on their way to win the tournament. Experience suggested they should have. But we wanted that lighter back, and this would be our last chance before they graduated.

The coin flip put Dave and Laurence on “gov,” so they’d get to decide the proposition to be debated in the round. Now, Amy and I were both philosophy majors with a notorious weakness when it came to cases about international relations. (As Amy liked to put it: “We don’t know about those other countries.”) So, naturally, Princeton’s A-team proposed a case opposing Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s decision to authorize the assassination of the Black September terrorists involved in the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. This did not bode well for us.

What happened next still mystifies me a bit. If I can borrow the slightly dippy metaphor Carlos Santana used to use to talk about improvisational music, it was though the hose had suddenly come uncoiled. We were both just suddenly on. It wasn’t the best debating I’d ever seen, not by a longshot, but I think it was the best debating we’d ever done, and I don’t think we matched it more than once or twice since. My usual meandering, slightly didactic style was suddenly focused, pithy, funny. I was dredging up old stories my father had told me about Spain’s fight with ETA and pushing the round into the more comfortably abstract terrain of how international norms applied to conflicts with non-state actors. My speeches weren’t as good as the ones Chris would have given, but I like to think they’re the sort he would have appreciated. I remember catching Dave’s eye as he and Laurence conferred over a few points for their closing speech, and seeing something in his expression, normally supremely confident, I’d only glimpsed once or twice before: Resignation to a loss.

By semifinals, we were both a bit spent; another Princeton team took us out and went on to lose narrowly themselves to the Yale team everyone had expected Dave and Laurence to duke it out with in a climactic showdown. But I didn’t mind too much either way at that point: We had something better than the Nats trophy. We had Chris’ lighter back.