AT THE FAIRGROUNDS — It started raining at eleven Sunday morning and it never really stopped, and at one o’clock the fair board met under the grandstand overhang and decided in about ninety seconds to run the derby on schedule. The reasoning, per Verna Tho: “The cars are already wrecked. The drivers are already wet. Everybody drove here.”

What they got was the best derby anybody could remember. A dry arena packs down hard and the heats end quickly. A wet one turns into a slow, absurd, magnificent affair in which nine cars slide sideways at four miles an hour and nobody can quite finish anybody off, and it goes on, and the grandstand — sitting in the rain, under garbage bags and one shared tarp — gets progressively louder.

The feature went to Tanner Pavek in a 1998 Crown Victoria painted, for reasons that were explained to this reporter twice and remain unclear, entirely in house paint the color of a school bus. He won on the strategy every wet-track winner uses, which is to do nothing for six minutes. “You let ’em bury themselves,” Pavek said. “I hit two guys all day. That’s not a strategy I’m proud of. It’s just what works when it’s like that.”

The mud, per the estimate of the tractor that pulled seven cars out afterward, was about nine inches deep at the north end. The last heat ended at 4:20. Nobody was hurt. The ambulance crew, which sits at every derby and hopes to be bored, was bored, and spent the afternoon under the overhang eating mini-donuts.

The rain kept up through the six o’clock close, which meant exhibit pickup happened in it — quilts under garbage bags, jars in cardboard flats, photographs held under jackets, and the entire town moving slowly across a wet fairgrounds carrying its ribbons home. Several people were heard to say it was the nicest ending the fair has had in years, which is a strange thing to say about rain, and was nevertheless said.