Monte battled back from losing their incredible Anubis streak to qualify over Brazilian hopefuls paiN in an incredibly tense deciding game.
DemQQ had large parts to play in both of the final two maps despite he himself struggling on map one, and was beaming from ear-to-ear as he spoke to BLAST.tv.
When asked how he felt straight after, he could barely find the words to describe it.
"I mean... I don't know!" he laughed. "A bit confused, a bit like feeling really good. You can not describe this feeling that you have after winning."
An ability to describe that feeling probably tells us more about how it feels than any words could, in truth. And so did the grin plastered on his face.
"I mean, confused like… amazing, confused, I don’t know. Very good!"
paiN let through Monte's feared Anubis, a map they'd won 15 games in a row on, seemingly setting up the Ukrainian team for success - alas, this was not the case.
An impressive showing from paiN unsettled Monte, and the Brazilians were able to do something few others could.
"Kind of decent, the first map was, erm, bad for me. Bad for all [of us] I would say, because we did not show up, we were kind of stressed, I don’t know why."
When pressed on if it was nerves that caused the loss on Anubis, DemQQ once again smiled and said "No, no, we were just shocked because we don’t count how many Anubis-es we won! [laughs] But when we see 15 it’s like “oh, oh shit! How can they leave in this map?”
"We were confident but suddenly something went wrong and we had to step up on the other two maps."
Indeed, step up they did - not least DemQQ himself, who went 19-6 as Monte absolutely eviscerated paiN on Nuke and won 16-1.
"We just came outside and say some words for the spirit, the team spirit you know?" explained DemQQ. "Everyone was super motivated because this was our last chance and you never know what’s going to happen after. It was an insane feeling, again, we just played. It is what it is, you know?"
DemQQ was clearly ecstatic - perhaps unsurprisingly, but perhaps a little more than even he might have expected, especially as he admitted himself that they "kind of expected" to qualify.
"You can beat any team if you do everything properly. Like, without mistakes or at least less mistakes than the other team. So yeah, we can beat any team here because everyone kind of stepped up."
The Legends Stage awaits this very dangerous underdog, and whether it's the unbridled euphoria of qualification or the bullish confidence of a team who know what they're doing, DemQQ isn't too worried.
"We can’t be too confident because it’s still better teams, I would say, like NAVI and Heroic and a few others, but still if you do your stuff that you train and prepare you can still beat any team, it doesn’t matter if it’s Challenger or Legends Stage."
When asked if we'd be seeing Monte in the playoffs, he exhumed a long "yeahhhhhh" before realising what he'd said, and reminding us that "we would like to but you never know, we will do our best and see what happens."
You can't fault their attitude or their self-confidence - and you'd struggle to bet against them doing the same thing again.
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