Last week, driving down from the Adirondacks, I stopped at a gas station check-out counter and let my eyes rest on a Lucite rack stuffed with luridly colored lottery scratch-off cards. They reminded me of something I couldn’t quite pinpoint: Flashy and silly, oozing hype and bulging type, each card conjured a different fantasy: “Ka-Ching!” “Pixie Dust,” “All About the Bens,” “Jumbo Bucks Jr.” (that one had elephants on it), “Winner Take All,” “Birthday Blowout.”

What was it that felt so hauntingly familiar? Ah – that was it! They recalled the hundreds of glossy printed postcards I’d been shuffling through in anticipation of the ninth annual New York International Fringe Festival, which trumpeted the imminent arrival of “Weddings of Mass Destruction,” “Sunset Bitch,” “Fluffy Bunnies in a Field of Daisies,” “The Monster Under My Bed Drank My Vodka,” “Bridezilla Strikes Back!” and other dramatic games of chance. Trying to predict which shows were least likely to disappoint (my money was on “Bridezilla”) was about as useful as trying to guess what number lies underneath the silver gunk on scratch-off lottery tickets. But, as in the lottery, when you pony up for the Fringe, you’re not paying for assured results, you’re paying for the flutter.

Since the New York International Fringe Festival started nine years ago, its reputation has grown steadily. Play submissions have increased, from around 300 in 1997 to around 800 this year; star actors and directors have multiplied; and performance spaces have evolved from humble (the un-air-conditioned Theatorium; the basement of Our Lady of Pompeii Church) to sort-of-grandish (the Lucille Lortel; the Flea; the Village Theater on Bleecker). Last year, 60,000 tickets were sold for the 200-odd shows of the eighth annual festival, and this year, it’s anticipated that 70,000 tickets will be sold.

Yet if the New York Fringe were a batter for a Major League team, it would have been retired, traded (or perhaps murdered) long ago. The percentage of hits that have emerged from the 1,500 shows that have appeared on its stages is negligible: Only one (“Urinetown”) has gone on to Broadway success, and the overwhelming majority of offerings are campy, over earnest, or amateur to the core. There have been just enough exceptions (nearly all of them comedies) to keep hope alive, among them: “Matt & Ben,” in which two women play Mr. Damon and Mr. Affleck in their pre-fame days; the saucy musical “Debbie Does Dallas”; and the self-parodying Asian-American skitfest “Sides: The Fear Is Real.”

Four out of 1,500 may not sound like terrific odds (nor would 100 out of 1,500) … but, then, the Fringe Festival is not important for what it achieves: To paraphrase Samuel Butler in “The Way of All Flesh,” it’s admirable not for what it produces, but for the faith it inspires that it is capable of producing something remarkable eventually. If eventually never comes, does it matter?

“This is not a hit factory,” Elena K. Holy, an original founder of the festival and the current production artistic director, said last week, as she scrambled to get an Internet connection going at this year’s Fringe HQ, which had only recently been secured. “Frankly, it’s still the same scrappy, really warm, downtown festival that it was in 1997. It’s a place for audiences and artists to come together and get to know each other.”

Not long before, a Fringe volunteer had taped a sign on the door of their donated office, imploring building residents to share an Internet hookup if at all possible. Fortuitously, a man on the stairs turned out to have worked as an intern for the Present Company (which produces the Fringe Festival) in 1998, and happily cooperated. “That kind of magical thing happens, I think, because of nine years of goodwill,” Ms. Holy said.

It is true that, over time, any tradition can generate nostalgia in the suggestible. Like the corner Italian restaurants whose besogged pappardelle still beat cooking for yourself; like the curbside solitary-donut confinement booths that dispense untoasted bagels and Styrofoam-laced coffee; like the unhurried plonkers who stand between you and your morning newspaper as they order their fan-spread of lottery tickets, the Fringe Festival, with its ragtag thousands of dedicated, irrepressible enthusiasts, has come to be one of those features of New York life that exist on the wobbly borderline between public nuisance and beloved institution, but whose presence, if erased, would be sorely missed. With the festival’s advent each year, in a touching triumph of hope over experience, comes a rush of adrenaline, and a flare of belief that something good might hit this time.

Three people who hope very much that it will this year are Jordana Williams, Sean Williams and Mac Rogers, creators of “Fleet Week: The Musical,” which opens Friday, August 19. Last year in May, they were driving in a van to Naples, N.Y. – a town so small that it doesn’t have a movie theater – to put on a play that had just been rejected by the Fringe, a drama about a female gumshoe. Disgruntled and rebellious, they began to mutter about the Fringe committee’s selection process. “What do those guys want, anyway – a gay sailor musical?” they groused.

Within minutes, they were riffing about the possibilities of just that subject, and free-associating from their memories of “On the Town.” Within days, they had come up with the outline of the book: During New York’s Fleet Week, four clueless sailors in the Coast Guard struggle with the revelation that they’re in love, and possibly gay, although they hope not (“Basically, nobody in the play’s supposed to be very bright, and everyone’s very sincere,” Ms. Williams explained). Meanwhile a band of terrorists from Martinique and a xenophobic zealot are conspiring to blow up the Statue of Liberty.

This May, the creative team learned that their sailor musical had in fact made the Fringe cut; last week, in one of scores of rehearsal spaces, the cast was energetically working out the kinks of a number about the Coast Guard code, in which a grinning chaplain flings foil wrapped Trojans from his hands like a parade clown dispensing candy, as he reassures his gender-confused charges that “There’s a lot of choppy water on life’s big and ugly ocean, from the cockiest of coxswains to the burliest of bosuns.” “It started as a joke, but it was a joke for about five minutes,” Ms. Williams, who wrote the lyrics, said at rehearsals. “It’s really an homage to musicals we love.”

Among the other curiously awaited shows this season are the musical comedies “Little House on the Parody,” “Silence! The Musical” (a parody of “Silence of the Lambs”). and Adobe’s Russ Meyer homage “Go-Go Kitty, GO!” On the serious side, there’s “Aquarium” (one collapses), which stars Jennifer “daughter-of-Cary” Grant (who helped out the production, taping up posters in the East Village); and “Half Life” with Anna Chlumsky, about a convicted pedophile’s return to society. Less classifiably, “Basura!” has puppets made of garbage, and the musical “Byzantium” sets out to prove that the no. 1 sin city of the ancient world put Las Vegas to shame.

Will these plays change the lives of theatergoers? Unlike the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which inspired its existence, the Fringe is not particularly serious or ambitious. But it’s got measureless gumption and possibility. In a little more than two weeks’ time, we will know which plays we loved, which we loathed, and which were word-of-mouth hits that suddenly proved impossible to get tickets to … by which time the preparations for the 10th annual New York International Fringe Festival will already be under way. Let the betting begin.

A Guide to the Fringe
For tickets, times, and locations, visit www.fringenyc.org.

The Rude Pundit in the Year of Living Rudely Lee Papa’s blistering one-man show is based on his cult blog, in which he lewdly lacerates public figures and religious leaders. Unfortunately, it’s already sold out its entire two-week run. – L.S.

Feud: Fire on the Mountain This New York Theatre experiment has been selling out its darkly comic resurrection of the white-hot hate between the Hatfields and the McCoys. – L.S. The Village Theater. August 12, 14, 22, 24 & 27.

Lynndie England For sheer weirdness factor, or to treat yourself to an Abu Ghraib-induced guilt wallow, check out this short drama by a French/Danish duo who describe themselves as ‘hostages of their own show.’ No blindfolds necessary. – L.S. P.S. 122. August 12, 14, 16, 17, & 20.

Bridezilla Strikes Back! When actress Cynthia Silver agreed to have cameras follow her as she prepared for her wedding, she thought she’d become the subject of a serious-minded documentary on the nuptials biz. Instead, she became one of Fox TV’s “Bridezillas” – the name of that network’s unflattering 2003 reality series. In this comic solo show – a hot ticket at the Fringe – she attempts to tell her side of the nightmare. – Robert Simonson The Flea Theatre. August 13, 16, 20, 23, 25 & 26.

The Friar and the Nurse Not all the lovers in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ are starcrossed. In a two-person romantic drama from North Carolina’s Epic Arts Repertory Theatre, Shakespeare’s Nurse and the Friar flit about on love’s light (if middle-aged) wings. – L.S. The Players Loft. August 13, 14, 16, 17, 19 & 20.

The Banger’s Flopera – A Musical Perversion Kirk Wood Bromley and the Inverse Theater Company’s musical ‘Duet’ was one of the highlights of the 2003 Fringe. They return this year with this musical ‘perversion’ of John Gay’s ‘Beggar’s Opera,’ which later inspired Brecht and Weill’s ‘Threepenny Opera.’ As is Bromley’s wont, high and low culture are mixed in equal portions, with ‘gangstaz, porn stars, and street singers’ all out to speak their piece in the author’s modern blank verse. John Gideon wrote the music. – R.S. The Village Theater. August 14, 18, 21, 26 & 27.

Seduction Arthur Schnitzler’s painfully blithe drama about infidelity in turn-of-the-last-century Vienna, ‘La Ronde,’ has been turned into a modern merry-go-round of gay love affairs in a play by London’s Shamelessboyz Theatre Company. – L.S. Players Theatre. August 17, 18, 19, 20 & 21.

SILENCE! The Musical This musical inspired by – of all things – ‘Silence of the Lambs’ is the single most anticipated show of this year’s Fringe, and not only because the gimmick is so delectably preposterous, what with ‘power ballads about decapitated heads,’ and a ‘singing Greek chorus of lambs.’ It also stars such New York-tested talent as Paul Kandel (as Hannibal Lecter), Jenn Harris (as Clarice Starling) and Lisa Howard, recently of Broadway’s ‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.’ – R.S. Lucille Lortel Theatre. August 19, 20, 21, 25 & 28.

Go-Go Kitty, GO! Many people thought Greg Jackson and Erin Quinn Purcell’s campy romantic tale ‘Duet!’ was the best thing off-Broadway’s adobe theatre company ever did. The two have taken their time following up on that success, but ‘Go-Go Kitty, GO!’ will finally have its debut via the Fringe. Rest assured, Mr. Jackson and Ms. Purcell have not gone serious on us: The Russ Meyer-influenced show is about ‘two go-go dancing bikerbabes’ who cross the country to solve a transvestite’s murder. – R.S. Lucille Lortel Theatre. August 18, 20, 21, 24 & 27.