The game had just gotten underway on Thursday afternoon. Twenty points separated the teams at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda. Dozens of spectators looked on in the sunlit commons area at three trios of contestants onstage.

They were pitted in the brainiac battle dome of “It’s Academic.”

The 30-minute quiz show — which started in Washington, D.C.’s NBC affiliate, WRC-TV, and continues weekly Saturday mornings on WETA — has been around since Oct. 7, 1961. High school students from the District and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs answer a grab bag of trivia questions.

At Walt Whitman this week, as contest host Hillary Howard lobbed a question toward the team at the center, Barry Kemelhor’s eyes bulged.

“A.J. and Big Justice brings the boom with this child whose signature gesture involves the chin rub and an eyebrow wiggle,” asked Howard.

Kemelhor, 73, bashfully conferred with two of his fellow Whitman Class of 1970 classmates. “I didn’t know this one either,” Howard said with a chuckle. Kemelhor shook his head and spoke into the microphone: “Miley Cyrus?”

Just 23 years and around 2 1/2 feet off.

“The Rizzler! The Rizzler,” Howard, who hosts the televised edition, said with an even wider grin. “Oh, of course,” Kemelhor said, rolling his eyes.

Kemelhor asked for this.

He had rallied a small group of classmates and their spouses to their alma mater for a weekend of class reunion activities. The kickoff was a throwback to the glory days of his own appearances on the show, a quintessential point of regional pride for young nerds. (Full disclosure: This Banner reporter is a former team captain of Lorton, Virginia’s South County Secondary School and two-time loser on “It’s Academic.”)

Spinoffs have appeared on television stations as near as Baltimore and as far as Australia and New Zealand.

Kemelhor was the captain of Whitman’s team in 1970 when they won the regional tournament. So he decided to commemorate the reunion with a competition that spanned three generations of questions and competitors — Whitman’s current, Gen Z “It’s Academic” team and a blended squad of millennial and Gen X Whitman staffers.

But the result of the competition didn’t go as planned for the alumni. The current students of Whitman narrowly beat their staff, and the alumni finished third.

One of Kemelhor’s teammates sensed their fate immediately.

“A few minutes in,” said Robin Sproul, “I knew we were cooked.”

It’s not so academic

Sproul, a former Washington bureau chief for ABC News, wasn’t on that “It’s Academic” team with Kemelhor back in high school and spent her days editing the yearbook. She and Kemelhor still fondly recall their years at Whitman.

“You had an option to go to no classes,” Sproul, 73, said. “It was the end of the ‘60s, we would have days off to protest. You could spend your whole day in art if that was what moved you. It was kind of a hippie-dippy time and I really had a very fun time.”

Kemelhor was on the “It’s Academic” team all four years of high school. He still remembers the one question on the televised show that he missed — and still argues he was actually correct. (Some of us remember the one baseball question they stole after it stumped another team.) The competition was his respite from the strife of that time, including fears about the Vietnam War.

“It was a really formative time in my life,” Kemelhor said. “I found it gave me a lot of confidence and composure and competitiveness and I thought it was something that I wanted to remember.”

Jack Pelmoter, captain of the Whitman “It’s Academic” team, has been on a similar path as Kemelhor. The 17-year-old senior has been on the team for the past three years. “I’m a three-time loser on ‘It’s Academic,’” Pelmoter said on stage. (Relatable. But sometimes you face stiff competition — like the eventual Teen Jeopardy! champion from Richard Montgomery High School.)

So, this competition was a good warmup for his last shot at their first-round TV taping in two weeks.

“It wasn’t something I ever thought would happen,” Pelmoter said. “When I heard, it sounded like a crazy idea. But we did it and it was really, really fun.”

The competition exposed some generational divides, such as when Pelmoter almost pulled off “Gilligan’s Island” but mixed television and literature by nervously answering “Gulliver’s Island.” Or when Kemelhor pleaded ignorance post-match to not knowing anything that goes on with TikTok because he doesn’t have a cellphone.

Putting aside his competitive streak, Kemelhor enjoyed the chance to run it all back.

“The captain of the victorious team, Jack, came over to me afterward and said, ‘Let’s do this again in 55 years,’ at which point I would be 128,” Kemelhor said. “And I’ll probably be even slower than I was today.”