ESPN knows this. For the past six years, it has been providing live coverage of the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee's final rounds, which translates into two and a half hours of children asking, "Can I have the word used in a sentence?" with varying degrees of hopefulness or desperation.

Over the course of the year, this coverage will be reaired from six to eight times. And finally the mystery will be gone. The country will know the winning word, the winning speller. And yet, we will still tune in, often in numbers exceeding those for the original airing. The reason for this is simple, and that reason is failure.

Failure, strangely, is not a recurrent TV guest. Entertainment generally means watching someone overcome adversity, whether large or small: George correctly identifies the phrase "Tea for two" and wins $5,000 and a refrigerator-freezer. Janice takes her dog to the vet and learns the true meaning of friendship. The capsule summaries of TV Guide tend not to include morsels such as, "After spending three months attempting to memorize the dictionary, Mary misspells lassitude and is sent back to Kansas with only a commemorative watch." But perhaps they should. As the ESPN ratings attest, that is apparently what we want to see.

Because while the official purpose of the bee may be to determine the nation's absolute best prepubescent speller, that winning moment only comprises 15 seconds of actual TV viewing. If ESPN wanted to, it could air the last half-hour of the bee and still provide a suspenseful buildup to the winning word, the resulting tears of happiness and the presentation of the engraved loving cup. But instead, that final 15 seconds is preceded by two hours, 29 minutes and 45 seconds of watching kids fail.