AT THE FAIRGROUNDS — Merle Sandbo pulled 312 feet 8 inches in the 9,500-pound farm stock class Friday night, and Duane Tvedt pulled 311 feet 6 inches, and if you want to know what those fourteen inches mean you had to be standing at the fence, because a photograph will not tell you.

These two have been pulling against each other since 2004. Sandbo runs an Oliver his father bought new; Tvedt runs a John Deere he has rebuilt so thoroughly that the argument over whether it is still the same tractor is a genuine philosophical question that has been litigated at the Northern Tap for years without resolution. Between them they have won this class fourteen of the last twenty-two years. They farm four miles apart. They have never, so far as anyone can establish, said an unkind word about each other in public.

Friday’s pull ran under the lights to a grandstand that filled by seven and stayed full through the last hook at 10:40. The track was fast early and got tacky, which is the sort of thing that decides a class by fourteen inches. Tvedt went first and put up a number that got the crowd on its feet. Sandbo went eleventh and last, and by the time he hooked, the sled operator had shortened the trip twice and the noise was such that this reporter could not hear the announcer standing six feet away.

He beat it, and the two men met at the sled, and Tvedt got there first with his hand out. “He had it in the pan and he knew it,” Tvedt said afterward, of Sandbo, of a pass he lost by a foot and change. “I’d rather lose to him than beat most people. Don’t print that.” It is printed. Sandbo, for his part, said the tractor did it and he just steered, which is the thing pullers say and which nobody has ever believed.

Sandbo’s grandson Jon, who is fifteen and who features elsewhere in this edition under less dignified circumstances, ran the fuel can and was, per multiple accounts, the loudest human being on the fairgrounds when the number came up.