MISQUAH — The Lakeside High School band held its spring concert Friday evening in the school gymnasium, working through a program of some ambition and ending, as the director had promised and the audience had hoped, with Sousa — played at volume, and more or less together.

The concert, the band’s principal performance of the spring, drew a full house of parents, grandparents, and the loyal handful who attend regardless of obligation, and proceeded through the customary range: a classical arrangement attempted with courage, a film theme rendered recognizably, and the annual jazz number during which, by long tradition, the trombones are briefly permitted to express themselves. The middle of the program, band director Phil Brekke conceded afterward, “had its moments, a few of them intended.”

But the spring concert exists, as everyone in the gymnasium understood, for its ending, which is always a Sousa march — played fast and loud and with the full conviction of forty young people who have waited all evening to play something everyone in the room already knows. “You can put whatever you like in the middle,” Brekke said. “You can challenge them, you can lose half of them in a key change, you can watch a clarinet quietly give up. But you end on Sousa. You always end on Sousa. They earn it, and the crowd earns it, and no one in the history of gymnasiums has ever walked out disappointed in a march.”

The march — “The Stars and Stripes Forever” — brought the audience to its feet, as it does, and the concert to its intended close. Mr. Brekke, who is nearing the end of a long tenure with the Lakeside band, allowed that the evening was “about as good as a spring concert gets, which is better than it has any right to be and not quite as good as their grandmothers will tell them it was.” The band next performs, in reduced and sunburned form, at the Fourth of July parade, where Sousa is not the finale but the entire repertoire.