Bowling lines have the best venue-fit on the sports list: the date is already at the alley, the shoes are already ridiculous, and a gutter ball is a bonding experience by design. Strikes, spares and splits supply the wordplay.
"Are you a strike? Because you knocked me over completely" is the tone — corny, venue-appropriate, delivered between frames while holding nachos.
Bowling is pre-installed date infrastructure — shared shoes, shared table, built-in turns to talk — so these lines are less openers than in-venue commentary. The gutter-ball humility jokes do the most work: charm at the alley is being funny about failure, since everyone fails frame by frame in public.
League nights add the social-fixture angle, cosmic bowling adds neon and forgiveness. The split-conversion metaphor — rescuing a hopeless position — is the connoisseur's compliment. The rest of the scoreboard lives in the sports collection.