After a winning debut on “Jeopardy!” Wednesday, a longtime Bangor Daily News reporter couldn’t pull off a repeat. But she has no regrets.
Emily Burnham, who covered Maine culture at the BDN for two decades and now publishes a regular newsletter on Substack, said she went into the competition with two goals: to make it to Final Jeopardy, and to win one game.
“I am thrilled I accomplished both,” she said on Thursday.
As a lifelong fan of the TV quiz show, she had periodically taken the “Anytime Test” and finally broke through this spring, earning her way through multiple screenings to the big stage. She flew to California over the summer for the taping, then held her tongue about how it went until Wednesday when the first show aired.
Burnham won her first match, building a lead then watching her two competitors whiff on the Final Jeopardy question before nailing it herself, correctly attributing an excerpt of a graduation speech to Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn. She finished the game with $17,201.
On Thursday, she missed the Final Jeopardy question — the answer was the Everglades (or “What is the Everglades?”), and the contestant who got it was fittingly from Florida.
That player, Nikolas Polsinelli, a student from Winter Park, won the game. Burnham came in second ahead of Carolyn Langton, an application developer from Wisconsin.
“I was honored to lose to an amazing young champion and to meet so many fun, smart and lovely people on my tape day,” Burnham said. “It was truly one of the best experiences of my life.”
