When Volkswagen announced it’s Spektrum color program for the Golf R for deliveries in 2019, I was pumped. I had always lusted after the hottest of the hot hatches, but I didn’t like the standard VW blue offered for the R—it was too purple for my tastes. I wanted one of the older blues, and when I saw I could order the Deep Blue Pearl (which I remembered from the 2004 R32), I happily put down my $1000 deposit with my local dealer and started to anticipate the day it would arrive. I thought I was waiting for my dream car.

Anticipating the delivery of a car is kind of fun. You get on these car forums and listen to the rumors and then real stories, with pictures, about people taking delivery. By early spring 2019, people were regularly reporting on getting their cars … but none in Deep Blue Pearl. I called Justin at Pignataro—okay, I may have called him every several weeks—to see if he could give me any timeline on when my car would arrive. And he couldn’t. He seemed to have no more visibility into it than I did. By early June, I was chomping at the bit.

And then, on June 14, a call from Justin. I figured the car had arrived. But when he said, “I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news,” I kind of knew which news it was going to be for me. Sure enough: “The good news is I can have you in a Golf R next week.” And then: “The bad news is, VW decided not to make all the Spektrum colors it had originally anticipated, but I can get you in one in Welch’s Grape Soda [note: my name, not the official VW name] or X [some other color I didn’t give a shit about].”

Well fuck.

All this trouble to put in the special order, all this anticipation for a car that I’d been kind of longing for ever since I owned my first VW, a 1977 Rabbit, that I just adored. I told him I’d need a day to think about it.

And then I drove straight down to the BMW dealership. You see, I was in a lease on a 428ix Gran Coupe, and my lease was up in several weeks. It was a pleasant enough car, but underpowered, maybe a tad too big, and just a little sedate. I had planned to turn the car in but now … I might as well see what was available.

The salesman heard what I was after and correctly pointed me to the M235i (I think, or was it the 240 by this point?). I was sold and we sat down to start the paperwork when the salesman said—and here’s where the clouds part and the ray of light shoots across the landscape and the angels start to sing—“Oh, before we do this, I just realized that we got an M2 in today and the guy decided not to take it, so that’s also available.”

At this point my memory gets a little funky. I’m pretty sure I tried to play it cool. I’m pretty sure I didn’t say, “The M2! The M2! The car I drove down at the M Driving School last year and swore that if it ever came available I had to have it,” only to be told that the waiting list for the car was two years long and the best I could hope for is that it might be my lucky day to walk into the dealership on the day someone who ordered one decided not to take delivery. That M2? Yeah, okay, I suppose I could take a look.

It was fresh off the truck, the protective padding all over the car, only a few sections of the body even visible. It was in Long Beach Blue, 6 speed manual, my dream configuration on my dream car. Honestly, it had a bunch of options I wouldn’t have chosen: the sun roof or the executive package that lifted the speed limiter and threw in a day at the M School. But I didn’t get to choose this car. It chose me.

I could bore you with more details: how my wife, who was there with me, simply said: “It’s your dream car, you’ve got to do it”; how we had to register it in her name because I’d forgotten my driver’s license; how we stopped down at the local Bank of America to grab a $10,000 cash down payment.

All I know is that a little while later, we were leaving the lot, me grinning ear to ear, driving my dream car. And I’ve been digging it ever since.