REALLY believed everything he was saying. He had the perfect tone in everything he was saying that made it all seem like this was a dude that REALLY believed that his YMCA league could hang with pros. As soon as he posted that haiku line it made it obvious that he was playing along, and most likely the playing along didn't start at that point, but long before.

That's why people were calling for archive before that. At some point he had to have started playing along making up stuff, but he was doing it so well there wasn't a clear point that jumped out as "Oh, he gotta be making this up"...but he was posting so much that we knew at some point he'd slip and post something that was obviously fake. The haiku line was it.