One of my favorite movies is "Waiting for Guffman, " Christopher Guest's sardonic yet ultimately hopeful 1997 comedy about the fictional small town of Blaine, Missouri, and its against-all-odds attempt to put on a one-day musical for the town's 150th birthday.

CNN: When the audience paddles up to the play

While Mazzio didn't take home a medal, her years of strenuous, against-all-odds training served her well as an entrepreneur.

FORBES: Olympian Entrepreneurs

Just as the Versailles Treaty produced not a lasting peace but an interlude between and pretext to war, so the Vance-Owen "peace plan" will assure the future outbreak of regional hostilities -- even if succeeds (against all odds) in temporarily suspending the present ones.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Center For Security Policy

Perhaps, against all the odds, a player has turned the match around -- snatching victory from the jaws of defeat to win in dramatic fashion.

CNN: Top 10 greatest grand slam finals

In 1997, against all odds, she created the daytime talk show, The View, a program co-hosted by five women, which was unprecedented at the time.

FORBES: Television Without Barbara Walters Is Hard To Imagine

But against all the odds, on the 16 July 1969, just 30 months after the fatal fire - the first Saturn V rocket attempting to carry men from the surface of one world to another rose into the Florida sky.

BBC: The magic of Apollo

If, against all odds, the latest intelligence estimates are right that it will take Iran a bit longer to get such long-range missiles, it would mean that we just might be able to have defenses against them in place before they are needed.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: The Obama doctrine