I watch Over the Garden Well as an annual tradition, and it’s always a fun time returning to its haunting and whimsical world and reuniting with its eccentric characters. However, I find that I notice something new every time.

In the episode “Schooltown Follies,” Greg is hanging out with a bunch of wild animals, when he decides to teach them a game called “two old cat.” According to him, this involves trying to find two old cats—though the cats can’t be too old. For many years, I thought this was just some strange, arbitrary idea Greg came up with, but things changed with a rewatch of the penultimate episode, “Into the Unknown.”

Unlike the other parts of Over the Garden Wall, “Into the Unknown” is focused on the “real world” that Greg and his brother Wirt came from. During their shenanigans, the two end up at a house party, and they pass by two teens having a conversation about different stick ball games: 

“Yeah, man, there’s lots of bat-and-ball games besides baseball—one old cat, two old cat, stoolball, roundball…”

It turns out that “two old cat” is an actual game! But more importantly, it opens up a window into how Greg perceives and absorbs the things he hears. Somehow, despite it being a fleeting moment, the words “two old cat” buried themselves in his memories. Greg then proceeded to just come up with his own idea of what this mysterious game was about, using his childish imagination, and the world of the Unknown feeds into it by providing old cats.

I wonder what I’ll end up discovering in future watches.