Drew Carey gets so, so happy as Price Is Right contestant nails Showcase bid

Few game show events on TV have a wider range of possible wrong answers than the climactic Showcase on The Price Is Right. For those of you who didn’t spend enough time home sick from school during their childhoods, the long-running game show’s final challenge works like this: Two contestants are presented with multiple prizes, with a value adding up somewhere in the five-digit range. Each then bids what they think the right price for the package is, and the one who’s nearest (WITHOUT GOING OVER, a very specifically conditioned part of our brain now screams) gets the loot. (If you’re within $250 of the actual value, you get both.) It might not be as hard as some of Jeopardy!’s nastier brain stumpers, but with a range of possible answers this massive, it’s still damn hard to do with any hope of accuracy. (In recent seasons of the show, contestants pull off the Double Showcase win only about 2 percent of the time.)

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All of which is to help explain why the excitement is goddamn palpable in the above clip from today’s episode of the show, when Canadian contestant Patrice Masse ventures a bid of $39,500 for a trip/car combo… and is revealed to have been off by only a single buck. Host Drew Carey certainly loves it, letting the moment build with the energy of a guy who lives for these moments (and Phish shows, and nothing else), revealing just how cleanly Masse has crushed it.

Carey goes so far as to declare Masse’s bid “the best Showcase bid in Price Is Right history,” which is fascinating in so far as Carey has been there when someone got a (much more obscure) number exactly right, once upon a time: The incident in 2008 in which retired weatherman Terry Kneiss brought the show to a screeching halt because his bid of $23,743 was right on, well, the money. Given that Carey and his producers were convinced Kneiss had been helped by an obsessive TPiR fan in the audience—claims Kneiss always denied, saying that he and his wife were amateur statisticians who simply tracked the prices of prizes on the show for months—it might help explain why Carey goes out of his way to say that Masse’s win today came with “absolutely no help from anybody in the audience, by the way.”

Anyway, that’s us descending into one of our daily Game Show History Nerd holes; the upshot is the sheer joy on Masse’s face as he realizes exactly what he’s pulled off, and the answering delight that infuses very ounce of Carey’s body.