1. He doesn't like grapes. It took a vending machine with nothing else in it to get him to try grape Ponta.
2. At night, when Ryoma can't sleep, he sometimes wonders what would have happened if he had never moved back to Japan. Never gone to Seigaku, never been brought to his knees on a ratty, dirt-covered court under the train tracks (by a kid, just a kid only a few years older than him, he'd beaten them before why couldn't he now what was wrong with him and why was the other boy looking at him like that), never learned how to fight for a victory, to throw everything and more into a game until he was flying, flying and nothing mattered but to just keep breathing and moving and not backing down. What would have happened if his tennis had only been sly smiles and mocking laughter and endless frustration.
It scares him more than he's willing to admit.
3. After the desperate, blistering rush of Kantou Daikai and Nationals that is his first year of middle school, his second year is saved only by the fact that Kaidoh-senpai and Momo-senpai do manage to get the club to Nationals, where there are at least the remnants of last years teams to give him a challenge. Ryoma's third year is marked only by endless amounts of paperwork and solid boredom. He itches for weekends when he can usually manage to drag members of his team (his real team, his proper team, not the idiots he's leading who barely know one end of the racket from the other) out to the street courts for a few matches so he doesn't lose his edge.
4. He's not quite sure when they became 'his' team.
5. Ryoma doesn't go pro right after middle school, which comes as quite a shock to everyone around him. He tells his parents (his father, numerous times) and his freshman friends that there's no point when he can't enter any of the serious tournaments until he turns sixteen. When he comes home his second week of school with a Seigaku High regulars jersey tucked under one arm and a grin that he can't seem to hide despite years of perfecting his detached expressions, his mother arches one eyebrow at him and he realizes he's not fooling anyone.
6. When he's standing with his team (and they are his, they are, even if he doesn't know why that's so important or when it started), ready to walk onto the court for the first regional match of the year, with Momo-senpai on one side, and Fuji-senpai on the other, and Buchou in front of him, and the roar of Kawamura-senpai's cheering ringing in his ears, breathless with anticipation and the beginnings of a familiar fiery stubbornness, he knows he made the right choice.
7. It takes a month before he realizes that high school tennis, despite the familiarity of the opponents, is nonetheless not quite the same as middle school. He realizes this after overhearing part of a conversation between Dan from Yamabuki and Rikkai-dai's Yukimura :
"Your doubles players are sleepingtogether?" Dan yelped.
"Yours aren't?" Yukimura asked, amused. "No wonder you lost so badly."
It's cemented by following golden pair after one of their wins and seeing Oishi-senpai push Eiji-senpai up against the wall (he made a hasty retreat as soon as that happened, they could damn well wait for their water, no matter what Momo-senpai said). He firmly decides that it is none of his business if his senpai all want to go mad, he doesn't see the point of it, and it's not like he plays doubles anyways.
8. Three weeks later, as he's walking up to the net after a particularly exhilarating loss to Tezuka, he finds himself wondering what would happen if instead of a handshake, he reached up and pulled his Buchou down for a kiss.
9. He spends the rest of the afternoon and evening in a state of quiet panic (not because Tezuka-buchou's a boy, he's always been fairly open-minded and anyway girls squeal to much, but because it's his Buchou, dammit) and it is only the thought of how much trouble he would be in if he skipped that makes him attend practice the next day.
10. Later in the week he wakes up sweating and shaking and panting as though he just did thirty laps and all he can remember is Buchou's eyes and voice and Ryoma wonders vaguely if he's going insane, because this never happened in middle school.
11. Ryoma thinks there are two types of tennis players. There are those who play because it's fun, or because they want to win, or because they're good at it, or for any number of reasons. They just play. And then there are those like Buchou. or Yukimura. The ones that could no more stop playing then they could stop breathing.
He thinks sometimes he'd count himself in the second group, and then realizes what that means and stops thinking about it.
20. What scares him more than anything else in the world is the idea that after everything that happened his freshman years of middle and high school, the pro-tennis circuit will be boring.