When “College Jeopardy!” contestant Craig Boge ‘07 appeared on the screen for the annual tournament’s quarterfinal round last night, Grove Lausen residents erupted in celebration.

Boge, clad in flip-flops, shorts and a white polo shirt, sat in the middle of it all, smiling sheepishly as his friends called his name and sporadically yelled out commentary. When his opponents — Hayley Clatterbuck, a senior from the University of Nebraska, and Brady Cassis, a Yale junior — appeared on the screen, there was some light jeering from the crowd.

Boge got off to a slow start in the first round, but quickly rebounded when he correctly answered a $1,000 question on state capitals. Cheers erupted in the room as Boge flew through a series of questions in a category about celebrities’ lives in college.

Later, in the category “You See ‘LA,’” Boge correctly answered that another name for a lasso was a lariat. When a friend yelled, “How the hell did you know that?” Boge grinned.

By the end of the first round, Boge was in first place with $5,200, ahead of Cassis’ $3,800 and Clatterbuck’s $2,000.

His lead wavered in Double Jeopardy!, however. After Boge incorrectly guessed that George Bernard Shaw wrote “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (which was actually penned by Oscar Wilde) and Clatterbuck made a late surge, the Stanford senior dropped into third place. The room groaned, but Boge remained stone-faced and revealed nothing about his coming surge, during which he regained the lead after answering a $2,000 question about Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”

When he broke $10,000 with more than half of Double Jeopardy! to play, the crowd seemed to relax, rallying only when Boge answered a particularly difficult question. After Clatterbuck missed a $2,000 question about the capital of Queensland, Australia, Boge buzzed in, only to hesitate until the last moments of his allotted time.

“What is ... Brisbane?” he answered tentatively.

Host Alex Trebek waited a moment before declaring the answer correct.

By the time Double Jeopardy! came to a close, Boge had $19,600 to his credit, while Cassis, his closest competitor, had only $9,000. The crowd issued a loud cheer when they realized that Boge had the game won irregardless of the outcome of Final Jeopardy! His friends then showered Boge with congratulatory claps and hugs.

“Yeah, that was incredibly tight,” Boge said as commercials rolled before the Final Jeopardy! question. “I realized that I didn’t even have to try.”

He was lucky. The final question, in the category “Fictional Characters,” asked about the character named in the first lines of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” Boge, who wagered only $600, wrote “Who is Atlas???”

“A good guess,” Trebek deadpanned as the audience laughed. Clatterbuck was the only contestant to identify John Galt as the correct answer.

Despite Boge’s final misstep, last night’s viewers in Grove Lasuen were in a celebratory mood as the ending credits rolled and Trebek shook the contestants’ hands onscreen. Boge’s friends curiously asked what Trebek had said to him.

“He told me, ‘You took no prisoners,’” a noticeably proud Boge answered.

He added that his dominant first round performance was “a gigantic relief.”

“I had a big fear of being behind and performing poorly,” he said. “Setting down my buzzer at the end of Double Jeopardy! realizing that I had nothing to worry about was great.”

As the winner of his quarterfinal round, Boge earned an automatic berth in next week’s semifinals, which will air at 7 p.m. on May 9, but he could not talk about his future performances due to a Jeopardy! regulation that prohibits contestants from revealing the outcome of the show prior to broadcasts.

Should his fans show up again?

“If you want to,” Boge said cryptically, before disappearing to play a celebratory round of video games with his friends.