MISQUAH — There were five girls on the starting line Saturday morning on the pavilion course, which is one more than Pike has had at a cross country meet in three years, and four more than are required to make the arithmetic work out differently than it has been working out.

A girls’ team scores five runners. Pike has had three since 2023. On Saturday it had five, and it scored, and it finished eighth of nine teams, and Coach Mark Koski has been asked about it eleven times since and has given close to the same answer each time.

“We scored,” he said. “That’s the whole thing. We scored.”

The two additions came out of the junior varsity volleyball roster, after Coach Leah Peltola wrote a letter to this newspaper on September 15 saying she had eleven girls not playing on Saturdays and that if two of them ran, Koski would have a team and she would still have one. Three girls asked her about it that week. Two of them ran.

They are not, at this point, fast. One finished 62nd of seventy-four. The other finished 71st, walked twice in the last half mile, and crossed the line eleven minutes and change behind the winner. She has said she is running again Saturday at Braham.

That is the part Koski wanted in the paper and the part he had to say twice before this reporter wrote it down correctly: a fifth runner’s time does not need to be good. It needs to exist. “She finished 71st and that finish is worth exactly as many points to this team as if she’d finished fifth,” he said. “That is not me being nice. That is the scoring system.”

Kyliegh Braaten finished sixth of seventy-four, her best placing of the season and the third straight meet in which she has beaten her seed. She was unhappy with her time, which is now the third consecutive week this newspaper has reported that she was unhappy with her time, and she has asked whether we are going to keep printing that. We are.

The boys finished fifth of nine with their top four inside twenty-eight seconds of each other, the tightest pack Koski has had, and he mentioned it once and then went back to talking about the girls.

Peltola came to the meet. Asked afterward whether she was glad she had written the letter, she said yes, and then said that she is down two players on Saturday mornings for the rest of the fall and that both things are true and she would rather people heard both. “I meant it when I wrote it,” she said. “I also have a serve-receive problem and now I have it with nine girls instead of eleven. Write that down too.”

Six people worked the chute, which is two more than the four this newspaper reported were needed and the same as the six the school’s sign-up sheet had asked for all along (see Corrections). They counted for two hours, did not cheer, and were released at 12:20.

Pike runs at Braham on Saturday. Koski needs seven girls to be safe, because five is a team only until one of them has the flu.

The meet itself was the usual small production. Nine teams, a mown course through the pavilion lot and up the hill that has been the hill since the course was laid out in 1988, six people in the chute, and a finish area that consists of rope, popsicle sticks and somebody’s card table.

The two new runners came out of a conversation in a volleyball locker room the week of the fifteenth. Three girls asked Peltola about the letter. One decided she could not give up Saturdays. Two said they would try it and both of them, by their coach’s account, asked first whether it would hurt the volleyball team.

Neither had run a race before. One had run in gym class. Koski gave them two practices, a pair of borrowed spikes in the correct size and one instruction, which he repeated to this newspaper as though it were obvious: finish. “I did not coach them,” he said. “There was not time to coach them. I told them the course and I told them that the only thing that matters on Saturday is that both of you cross that line, because the fifth runner is the whole team.”

They both crossed it. The team scored 219 points and finished eighth of nine, ahead of a Hinckley squad that has run five all season.