It’s a traditional competitive sport … one that requires hard work, determination, discipline, attentiveness, patience and the ability to anticipate.

It continues to grow in appreciation; not just in this country, but internationally. Fall is the time of final defeat for most, victory for a lucky few. No, I’m not talking about baseball. I’m talking about growing giant pumpkins.

During the final weeks of September and throughout the month of October, millions of people, around the world, take in a fall festivals showcasing pumpkin parades, pumpkin carving contests, pumpkin sculpture, pumpkin pie-eating contests and pumpkin beer. Many of these festivals feature giant pumpkin weighoffs as well.

It’s become all the rage. There are competitions popping up everywhere, with more and more growers getting into the game all the time. Take, for example, the Prince Edward County Pumpkinfest, held annually in Wellington, Ontario, Canada, where last year’s first-place winner was Harley Sproule of Ormstown, Quebec. (just up the road from me. His elephantine entry weighed in at an awe-inspiring 1,654 pounds. This year, Ryan Hoelke of Eganville, Ontario, took first-place honors with a praiseworthy pumpkin (which he calls “Donald Trumpkin”), that tipped the scales at an astonishing 1,800.5 pounds, just 18 pounds lighter than the County Pumpkinfest record set by Jim and Kelsey Bryson of Quebec in 2011. (The Bryson pumpkin set a world record at the time.) Just days before Hoelke’s win, Todd Kline, of Shawville, Ontario, took top honors at the 30th annual Port Elgin Pumpkinfest with a wonderfully weighty 1,877-pound prize winner; setting a new Canadian record.

One of the best-known giant pumpkin festivals is the annual Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Half Moon Bay, California, which celebrated its 43rd year this month. At the event, Walnut Grove, California’s Rob Globus’ presented a preposterously ponderous pumpkin, which weighed in at an impressive 1,681 pounds. And believe it or not, that was only good enough for fourth place (and $1,000 in prize-money).

Jim Sherwood of Mulino, Oregon took third place, beating Globus by a mere 18 pounds. His 1,699-pound beast of a pumpkin won $1,500. Edging past Sherwood with a 1,723-pound leviathan was Russ Pingry of Santa Rosa. He won $2,000 and an additional $1,000 for the biggest entry from the state of California. But the competition was squashed by a mega-monster of a pumpkin belonging to Cindy Tobeck, an elementary school teacher from Little Rock, Washington, which checked in at a whopping 1,910 pounds. Her prize: nearly $11,500.

1,910 pounds is small potatoes, however (or should I say pumpkins), when compared to those setting world records. At the 2016 Uesugi Great Pumpkin Weigh-off, held on Oct. 12 in San Martin, California, Tim Mathison of Napa, California, found himself at the top of the heap after his super-sized squash, a massive 2,032-pound behemoth, not only took the first place prize of $7 per pound (earning him a very nice cash payment of $14,224), but proved to be this year’s record North American heavyweight pumpkin champion.

That 2016 record was quickly broken, though, by Richard Wallace, of Coventry, Rhode Island, who hauled his Herculean hulk of a pumpkin to the annual Frerichs Farm Pumpkin Weigh Off in Warren, Rhode Island, where it tipped the scales at a mind-boggling 2,261 pounds, beating not only this year’s record, but the previous Frerichs Farm Weigh Off record of 2,230 lbs., set by his son, Ron, in 2015. (Ron Wallace was the first person in the world to grow a pumpkin weighing more than a ton. He set the world’s record with a prodigious 2,009-pound pumpkin phenomenon, in 2012.)

Now, a 2,261-pound pumpkin is massive, but even a giant as ginormous as Richard’s home-grown Rhode Island Goliath fell short of the reigning world record of 1,054 kilograms, or 2,323.7 pounds, set by Swiss grower Beni Meier in 2014.

And even that may not be big enough! It would appear that Mr. Meier’s record has just been crushed! Earlier this month, a pumpkin of unimaginably enormous proportions; a cucurbit so colossal; a contender so commodious, a Godzilla-gourd so gargantuan weighed in at the Giant Pumpkin European Championship in Ludwigsburg, Germany at 1.190,5 kilograms or 2,624.6 pounds; literally eclipsing Mr. Meier’s record by more than 300 pounds and claiming the new World Record for a Belgian man; Mathias Willemijns. At the time of this writing, Willemijns’ title has yet to be confirmed by Guinness World Records.

To the best of my knowledge, New York has had only two world record-holders. Donald Black of Winthrop took top honors in 1993 and Paula and Nathan Zehr of Lowville were world champions in 1996.

We’ve come a long way since William Warnock, the first person to officially grow a world record pumpkin, saw his 400-pounder take first prize at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, France. He broke his own record in 1904 with a 403-pound winner at the St. Louis World’s Fair.

Warnock remained in the record books until until 1976, when Bob Ford took the title with a 451-pound humdinger. That record remained until 1980, when Howard Dill took him out with a 459-pound pip of a pumpkin. To date, Howard Dill, a Nova Scotian, is the only four-time world champion pumpkin grower. And in giant vegetable-growing circles Howard Dill is often referred to as the father of all pumpkins. He’s the developer of patented seeds for a pumpkin variety he fittingly named Dill’s Atlantic Giant. Twenty generations of competitive pumpkins can trace their roots back to Dill’s Atlantic Giant seeds. And the more than 10,000 enthusiasts who entered giant pumpkin contests in 14 countries this fall will all be using seeds derived from Atlantic Giants.

Atlantic Giant-derived pumpkins are also used in pumpkin regattas; water races in which paddlers sit inside giant carved-out pumpkins and race across a lake. But that’s another story.