A fitting word, perhaps, for Sai Gunturi who nonchalantly spelled it correctly in the final round of the 2003 Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee Thursday.

Most of the competitors in the bee, however, were anything but nonchalant.

The basement of the D.C. Grand Hyatt was full of tension and disappointment as the day dragged on. In the hall outside the competition room, one speller, just eliminated, was near tears as he spoke to a reporter. A friend put an arm around him, and led him away. Others, who had finished earlier, sat chatting or playing cards while the remaining competitors squinted into the stage lights inside.

The poet Diane Ackerman writes about a phenomenon called “deep play” – the sense of calm and perfection that comes to athletes, actors, musicians and artists when they are “in the zone,” totally absorbed in their craft. The kids onstage in the spelling bee didn’t look like they were in the zone; they looked like they were on the spot.

New Haven speller Natalie G. Alexander, the only competitor from Connecticut to make it to the second day of competition, was knocked out in the morning’s first round, after spelling “metastasize,” a word that means the spread of disease through a body, with a “c” instead of an “s”.

“I misspoke,” Alexander said after the round, although she said knew the word. Her parents agreed.

What did in Alexander was probably nervousness – the “brain freeze” that her father, Phil Bernstein, had warned her about the day before. She was not “pococurante” enough.

An eighth-grader, Alexander is not eligible to compete again. She’ll stick to soccer and playing the cello.

The other two spellers from Connecticut, Trumbull seventh-grader Rebecca Eve Tobet and eighth-grader Jesse Kenneth Glanz of Eastford, were both eliminated on the first day.

All three of them said they were relieved after they were eliminated.

Watching the finals in casual clothes, surrounded by their families and friends, they seemed like different people than they had been the day before, with yellow numbers strung around their necks like marathon runners.

Glanz, who plays basketball, football and snowboards, said the spelling bee was different than other competitions.

“This is a lot bigger,” he said. “Nerve-wracking,” he called it – the same phrase Gunturi used to described the competition to reporters.

Gunturi, an eighth-grader from St. Mark's School of Texas in Dallas, Texas, has been to the national bee three times before -- placing 32nd, 16th, and 7th. He said his previous experience “built up my stress tolerance.”

The last word came easily, he said, because he had studied it the night before.

The other finalist, Evelyn Blacklock of Tuxedo Park, New York, has been in one previous national bee.

In the final rounds, her nerves seemed to tell on her. Earlier in the day, like most of the spellers, she was slow and cautious, asking for definitions and roots, carefully working out the order of letters in her mind.

The two words she missed in her championship round with Gunturi came rolling off her tongue in quick, dull monotone. They were “gnathonic” meaning “flattering” or “deceitful” and “seriatim,” in a series.

“I just didn’t remember,” she said afterwards.

Gunturi will receive a 12,000 prize from Scripps Howard, in addition to the awards given to all spellers: a watch, a $100 savings bond. Blacklock will get $6,000.