Basic Trope: The final round practically invalidates the previous rounds.
- Straight: Bob and company are playing Tropeball and losing. Then comes the final round — which they win, so they win the entire game.
- Exaggerated: Bob's team has lost every event in the game by a wide margin — but when it comes time for the final round, they ace it and end up winning outright.
- Downplayed:
- Bob's team is in fourth place, and the strong showing in the last round is good enough to bump them up to second.
- Bob's team is in fourth place, but the Golden Snitch places them in a tie that they might win — it's still a more honorable place to be than fourth.
- Justified:
- The final round is worth the most points, but does not guarantee victory.
- The first two rounds are more of a warmup than anything. Their outcome gives advantages or disadvantages in the final round, but everyone knows the final round is winner take all.
- Inverted: Bob and team are seemingly cruising to an easy victory, but because they performed poorly in one of the early rounds, they're disqualified from winning.
- Subverted: Bob's team is in last place. A strong showing in the final round is good enough to ... bump them up by one place.
- Double Subverted: For whatever reason, all the other teams violated at least one rule/regulation of the sport/league, so they all get disqualified and Bob and his compatriots win by default as the only team to play 100% fairly.
- Parodied:
- Bob's team is a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits that just walked off the street and into the game. They don't even participate in the prior rounds, and only show up for the last one — which they win. Therefore, they win the entire game by a wide margin.
- The competition for a cancer charity always has as a last round developing a Cure for Cancer which invalidates everything else because well it is more important than the whole competition!
- Zig-Zagged: Tropeball's credo is that each league must play by different rules, so in some regions of Troperia the last round of each game counts for ⅞ of the final score; in other regions, it's worth ½, ⅗, ⅓, or whatever.
- Averted:
- The final round may be weighted more heavily than others, but not by an unreasonable amount.
- Even if they capture the Golden Snitch, Bob's team is too far behind on points for it to make any significant difference — the best-case scenario is a tie, not a win, and the tiebreaker will be just as (if not more) humiliating than a plain loss.
- Enforced: "We need to create tension, so let's have the last event count for more!"
- Lampshaded: "Dammit, what did we play so hard for all game if the last round was gonna count for ten times as many points?"
- Invoked: The founder of Tropeball and first commissioner of the League was not actually very good at the sport himself, and he got the rules changed to allow weaker teams to join their better counterparts in the last round of each match due to his Tall Poppy Syndrome.
- Exploited: Because the last round is worth so many points, the Opposing Sports Team plays their worst players in every other round, saving their superstars for the final.
- Defied:
- The Tropeball League creates a rule that states only the top competitors can make it to the final round.
- The "Golden Snitch" rule has been declared strictly optional by the League, and as a result there are many games in which it doesn't gets used because it's obvious cheater-bait.
- Discussed:Alice: You shouldn't get into the playoffs no matter what in this league, Bob. You could never have kicked your game up a gear or twelve from your regular-season quality and eliminated us.
- Conversed: "Why did we watch the first rounds again?"
- Implied: Bob is shown looking dejected just before the announcer calls the teams to the playing area for the final round. Cut to Bob, Darren, and Enrique jumping for joy outside the arena.
- Deconstructed: Because the final round is the only one that has any merit, the viewers tune out for the opening rounds, costing the Tropeball League a ton of viewers. As a result, the sport fails.
- Reconstructed: The Tropeball League regroups and explicitly asserts in its charter that a percentage of points will be awarded to each team proportional to the difficulty of each round.
- Plotted a Good Waste: The Golden Snitch is a MockGuffin, leading to An Aesop of "never half-ass your gameplay and never assume that there is such a thing as "easy, fool-proof" ways to win".
- Played for Laughs:
- The Tropeball League is a comedy festival, and so participants tell their worst jokes early and their best jokes later.
- Bob's team is losing 0/199 to the other team and so goes through hell and high water to get their hands on the Snitch, and they capture it triumphantly… to lose the game, 199 and three-quarters to 200 (the other team's goal was just not focused on during the struggle to get the Snitch).
- Played for Drama: Bob's team wins the Tropeball Trophy, but the other competitors feel that since they were losing until the final, they didn't truly deserve it, leading to infighting among the players.
- Played for Horror:
- The "Golden Snitch" is a battle royale. Yes, as in that "battle royale". Contestants tend to fall for the "it will make you win instantly" detail without wondering about potential catches, and once they figure out the catch, it's too late to back off.
- The player who tries to get the Golden Snitch is murdered by the Jerk Jock of the Opposing Sports Team, scaring off everybody else from taking that specific route to win the game.
- The "Golden Snitch" is a special ball that nails itself to the player's hand and must reach the endzone within 10 seconds of grabbing it or else it will turn the player into a Jackson Pollock painting.
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