Tara Bahrampour:

It wasn’t quite a Miss America pageant, but it had a gusto of its own. To the beat of rock music, more than 200 middle schoolers in T-shirts adorned with pi symbols or jokes about binary numbers jogged into a Crystal City hotel conference hall yesterday, waving and holding up signs identifying their home states.
The 57 teams — from every state, plus the District, the U.S. territories and military or State Department schools around the world — had spent the day vying for the MathCounts national championship, and they were about to find out which four-member team had won.

Madison area middle schools that participated included Hamilton (Madison), Jefferson (Madison), Eagle (Fitchburg), Badger Ridge (Verona) and Madison Country Day School (Waunakee). Mathcounts website.