“You can’t change the rules after you play the game.” There’s no other way of saying that.
    I’d be redundant to simply rephrase it, play verbal checkers and substitute a few words, like this: You can’t change the rules after you’ve already agreed on them, even if you’re unhappy with the outcome of the process.
    There, that’s not really better, just different.
    Until last night, I was involved in a process with others in which every participant has gotten many chances to voice his or her opinion. My concern, for several months has been that mere whim trumps agreed-upon rules, and when the outcome displeases one, there’s the desire to re-create the past.
    I ruminated over this principle for hours last night and was able to recall several examples in which the axiom gets applied.
    In the heat of a national primary convention, a dozen years ago, in which Democrats take on Democrats and Republicans do the same to fellow GOP members — before kissing and making up, the rules/game principle was applied. I recall that two strong factions agreed to put a delegate matter to a vote.
    Obviously, one side expected to win that contest, but when it got clobbered, the losing side asked for a re-vote, with a few crucial amendments. “But you can’t change the rules . . . etc,” some shouted.
    Then, in a real shockeroo, one of those proposing the change took a half hour of his five-minute allotment and said, “I realize we can’t change the rules after we play the game.” As politicians are wont to do, he provided a pregnant pause, then said, “but this is not a game.”
    Waaaiiittt a second! It’s true that they weren’t exactly playing tic-tac-toe or Scrabble; they were voting on a weighty issue. It’s true there weren’t whistle-blowing referees there to assess personal fouls. Still, the analogy — or as my English teacher would say, “That’s a metaphor, Arthur” — applies: There were rules, you agreed to them, and when you lost, you wanted to change them.
    Having played many parlor games in my youth, whether Old Maid, Crazy Eights, Canasta or checkers, I am painfully familiar with competing against some people who want to win at all costs. They try every trick to win, and some suggest, “How about the best two out of three?” That tack gives the original loser a chance to win a couple of straight games, or ask for the “best three out of five,” or even “the best 51 out of 100,” depending on the streak. But it doesn’t really change the rules.
    As for me, I never felt any zeal to win at parlor games. If we enjoyed the game and all of us felt good afterwards, winning wasn’t important to me.
    Really.
    But I’d become impatient when one of the players would say, “I realize I didn’t buy Boardwalk and Park Place when I landed on them an hour ago, but now that you might land on one of them, I’ve changed my mind. I want to buy them and build hotels.”
    Another specific case of changing the rules after the fact came when two older boys challenged three of us to a game of basketball — first team to hit 20 wins it.     The Railroad barrio we tamed wasn’t exactly a hoopster’s paradise, the only inflated ball belonging to brothers Jimmy and Clyde. They allowed all to use it, provided it stayed in the yard.
    My buddies and I were about 12 at the time, challenged by two other boys around 15. So cocky were they that they even gave us the ball first. That allowed us to do our Alan Iverson-Michael Jordan heroics, and we actually beat them. We didn’t possess any particular skills, but since we outnumbered them, it was easier for one of us to break for the basket.
    We won 20-14. The older boys huddled, and instead of asking for a re-match, did some fast computations that would have made our math teacher at Immaculate Conception School — Sister Mary Tangentia Cosine — quite proud.
    The vanquished teens reasoned that since there were only two of them, their seven baskets should count for three points each, for a total of 21, which means, “We beat you, suckers!” They had come up with a three-point shot well before it got introduced into the NBA.
    Well, our side didn’t concede, even after one of them invited all of us to “step outside to settle this.” He punctuated the invitation by spitting out a rotten tooth, which may have gotten rearranged in a scramble for a rebound, or perhaps kept handy for occasions like this. Then he repeated, “Let’s schtep outside.”
    Did our opponent fail to notice we already were outside? The last time anybody checked, the Apodacas’ back yard didn’t have a dome.
    The error hit us winners at the same time, and we cracked up. My (suppressed) impulse was to suggest that “we all step inside to settle it.”
    Before the bigger boys tried to persuade us to tinker with the scoreboard, we vanished. They strutted off, proud of having “won” a game, 21-20, by changing the rules, which, they said, “is only fair.”
    We snuck off, proud of having won by insisting we all stick to the rules.
    Parlor games and even one-on-one basketball have become rarer in recent years, and recalling instances in which people would actually storm off after losing a game of cards or marbles still surprised me. Some of those who want to undo the past to increase their chances of winning this time, invariably start their “It’s just a game, Silly — don’t take it so seriously” mantra.
    Well, I’m through expounding on the difficulty of rephrasing the axiom. If someone can come up with a succinct equivalent, I’ll even agree to help you finance a hotel on Boardwalk.
    Or let you count each basket as three points.