MISQUAH — The last home game of a Legion career is a small thing in the arrangement of the world and an enormous one in the arrangement of a town, and Friday night it was both. Post 162 beat Braham 7–4 under the one working light tower, in front of the biggest crowd of the summer, on a night cool enough that the third-base bleachers were all sweaters by the fifth.

The four — Ben Aune, Tyler Ruud, Marcus Solberg, and Owen Bergstrom — have played together since they were fourteen years old on the Pike rec nine and have been the spine of these teams for three summers. Manager Randy Dolen recognized them and their families before the first pitch, briefly, per his lifelong policy on ceremonies, which is that the shorter they are the harder they hit. It took four minutes. It was plenty.

All four got hits. Solberg had two. Bergstrom, who has caught nearly every inning of the last two seasons and whose knees are a running item at the cleaning station, threw out a runner in the fourth and then jogged to first on a walk in the fifth like a man who intended to enjoy the rest of it. Ruud pitched the eighth.

And in the bottom of the sixth, with two on and the game at 4–4, Ben Aune — who has driven in a remarkable share of every run this club has scored for three years — hit a ball off the fence in left-center that scored both and, as it turned out, decided the season’s last home game. He stood at second and looked, as everybody in the ballpark knew he would, toward the third-base fence, where his mother was holding a telephone up over the chain link, turned toward the field, so that a woman recovering four hours from here could hear a crowd she has known her whole life make that particular noise.

She has been the librarian in this town since 1994 and she taught most of the people in those bleachers to read. This newspaper has no further comment on the sixth inning, and neither, when asked, did Ben Aune, who said only: “She heard it.”