Petunia.

Hector.

Autobahn.

As the evening wore on at Thursday's Minnesota Seven-County Metro Area Regional Spelling Bee in St. Paul, the words got trickier.

Hypocrisy.

Cringle.

Panglossian.

One by one, the 28 young contestants fell away, some wincing as they finally misspelled a word on the stage of a Minnesota History Center auditorium.

Kovsh.

Purga.

Finally, at 10:10 p.m., after 12 rounds, the bee was down to two young spellers. One, Nathan Salo, 14, of Falcon Ridge Middle School in Apple Valley, misspelled banzai (the cheer), and He Li, 13, of Central Middle School in Eden Prairie, stepped forward to spell anachronism correctly.

Li will travel to the national tournament in Washington, D.C., in May.

He said he doesn't remember every word he spelled correctly, just the ones he sweated over, including quinine and forsythia.

"I feel great," he said. "I didn't expect to get this far."

His mom, Lin Xu, beamed. "I'm so proud," she said. "He had a high fever today. I didn't want him to go, but he wanted to."

The mood at the bee was intense. Just before it began, Sheldon Quaderer and Terri Skorczewski admitted that they were more nervous than their son, Jesse, a fifth-grader at Lyndale Community School in Minneapolis.

As they looked on from the back of the auditorium, Jesse sat on stage fiddling with his lanyard, which announced that he was No. 109.

'Pretty intense'

"I think his attitude is, it's mostly no big deal," Quaderer said. Still, he said, "If you have a kid in the competition, they're pretty intense."

Jesse's mom said he's an avid reader, mostly of nonfiction, so "it seems almost natural for him to a good speller," she said.

That doesn't mean they didn't practice, she said. They'd been practicing in the car on the way to the bee, she said, adding that the car is a favorite practice spot.

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman offered the introduction.

"I'm not much of a speller, but I know how to spell 'success' and it's h-a-r-d w-o-r-k," Coleman said. "And no matter who wins today and moves on, they have all been successes."

Standing in the way of that glory: Words. Hundreds of them. Some obscure, some plain tricky.

And not a spell-checker around, except for the one whirring noiselessly in the head of a kid alone on stage and trying to shut out the distractions of an audience, judges, other contestants and bad luck.

They did it well. But in the end, He Li did it best of all.

Event faced obstacles

All things considered, organizers of this year's bee are simply happy to have pulled it off after an unusually turbulent year in which the number of participants was down slightly.

"Has it been a little bit of a scramble? Yeah. Because we haven't done it before," said Chris Sandberg, a partner with the Minneapolis law firm Lockridge Grindal Nauen.

The law firm stepped in as a sponsor in December after the bee went months without a sponsoring organization.

That's because last summer, after the Scripps National Spelling Bee began charging a $99 school participation fee, the Star Tribune dropped out as a sponsor. Star Tribune representatives said the decision to pull out was based on the new fee.

But without a sponsor, some schools dropped out. Others scrambled to get back on track once the law firm stepped in to fund it.

Sandberg said the decision to sponsor it was easy. "We're lawyers. We work with words everyday. It's our lifeblood," he said.

As for next year, he said, "We have first dibs. ... At this point, we're very enthusiastic."

Eric M. Hanson • 612-673-7517