In the most extraordinary ending in the 94-year history of the Scripps National Spelling Bee competition, the event ended in an eight-way tie on Thursday.
Among the eight co-champions was Rishik Gandhasri, a seventh grader at San Jose's Chaboya Middle School.
The 13-year-old may have sensed it was going to be a very long night; as he stepped to the microphone for the ninth round of the prime-time finals, he asked the pronouncer "Just out of curiosity, do you happen to know what time it is?"
It was 11:18 p.m. Forty-five minutes later, Rishik was a champion.
So were Erin Howard, Saketh Sundar, Shruthika Padhy, Sohum Sukhantankar, Abhijay Kodali, Christopher Serrao and Rohan Raja. The eight co-champions closed out the bee by spelling 47 consecutive words correctly.
Rishik was the only one of the self-proclaimed "octo-champs" from the West Coast.
All eight will receive the full winner's freight of $50,000 in cash and a new, custom-designed trophy because Scripps simply could not come up with words difficult enough to challenge them.
Among the words that earned spellers a share of the title: auslaut, palama, cernuous, and odylic.