MISQUAH — It is a matter of some local record that on the night of July 5, 1991, a younger Al Lundquist, having won an argument and lost track of his judgment, ran the length of Main Street wearing, by most accounts, his boots, an expression of total commitment, and nothing else this newspaper is in a position to itemize. He was 23, and it was well after midnight. The town has called it “the streak” ever since — with a small and durable thrill at getting to say the word aloud in mixed company — and the run entered the town’s oral history more or less intact and has been retold, with the usual inflation, every summer since.

On Friday night, at 58, he attempted the sequel. It did not go the distance.

By the agreement of the dozen or so witnesses at the Northern Tap, the wager began as wagers there often do, with someone saying a thing couldn’t be done and Mr. Lundquist disagreeing on principle. The figure settled at forty dollars. The terms, as later reconstructed, required a recreation “in the spirit of the original,” a phrase that has since generated more debate than the run itself. Mr. Lundquist, it should be noted for the record and for the squeamish, resolved that debate well in advance and in the fullest possible sense, setting out Friday night dressed precisely as he had been in 1991 — which is to say, not at all.

He cleared the front step of the bar and roughly forty yards of sidewalk before reaching the patched apron in front of the hardware store, where a band of loose pea gravel — swept there, by some accounts, from the very repaving the Methodists are about to undertake — ended the attempt abruptly and at speed. “He was doing fine,” said Deb Pavek, who owns the Northern Tap with her husband Bud. “Right up until he wasn’t. It was like watching a calendar page turn. One second it’s 1991, the next it’s very much now.”

Mr. Lundquist came to rest with abrasions to both knees, both elbows, and his dignity, in roughly that order of severity. The Misquah first responders were summoned by a bystander and arrived to find the patient seated on the curb, declining transport, declining advice, and, witnesses said, demanding confirmation that he had won. He had. The forty dollars was paid Saturday.

The matter would have closed there but for the stain. Two washings by Saturday afternoon and a third by Sunday have failed to lift a dark mark roughly the size of a manhole cover from the concrete, and the city now faces a small, genuine question of policy. Alderman Pete Hagen has proposed a rented pressure washer. Alderman Bunde has proposed leaving it “as a lesson,” though he was vague on the lesson’s precise content. The matter is expected to reach the July 7 council meeting, where it will compete for attention with eighteen proposed houses (see News).

Mr. Lundquist, reached at home and moving carefully, asked the paper to record three things: that he had “still had it, right up until the gravel”; that the original 1991 run had been on a cooler night and a swept sidewalk, conditions he considered material; and that he had no plans, none whatsoever, to attempt a third edition at 81. “Some things,” he said, “you do once, and then you talk about for thirty-five years. I just didn’t understand, until Friday, why it was only once.”

The Editorial Board offers its own view of the stain elsewhere in this edition. Mr. Lundquist, for his part, reports that he is healing, that the knees are the worst of it, and that he would like it known he ran in a straight line the entire way, “which,” he noted, “not everyone can say.”