MISQUAH — The Fourth of July kids’ races went off on schedule on the school grounds Saturday afternoon, drawing the usual crowd of sprinting children and anxious parents, and producing the usual two-tier result: a handful of genuine winners, and a great many other children who, by the careful and longstanding diplomacy of the event, also placed.

The races — divided by age and run on the grass behind Oakview — are a fixture of the holiday afternoon, slotted between the noon chicken feed and the evening fireworks, and conducted under the firm unwritten rule that every child who runs receives, at minimum, a ribbon, a popsicle, and the assurance that they did wonderfully. “There are winners,” explained rec director Lori Dahl, “and then there are the official results, which are kinder. We’ve run it this way for years. Nobody goes home with nothing. That is not what the Fourth is for.”

The genuinely fast children were genuinely fast, and were duly and loudly celebrated; the rest were celebrated nearly as much, the margin of celebration narrowing as the ages dropped, until in the youngest division — run for the three- and four-year-olds — the finish was declared a universal and simultaneous victory, “because at that age,” Dahl said, “running in the correct direction is the entire achievement, and most of them managed even that.”

The official results, such as they are: the eleven-and-twelves ended in a three-way dead heat among Maren, Greta, and Liv Vekved that no adult present felt qualified to adjudicate; Brynn Solberg took second in the nine-and-tens and asked, at the ribbon table, whether there was a reading category; and the parents’ race went to Eric Sorensen — ten days a father and running, by his own account, “on adrenaline and no sleep whatsoever” — by a margin the other fathers have asked go unrecorded. Lois Hamre, recruited to time the finals, kept the numbers “in pencil, out of kindness.”

The afternoon concluded, as it always does, with popsicles distributed without the slightest regard to finishing order, a sack race that dissolved within ten yards into a single laughing pile, and a parents’ race that several of the fathers took a good deal more seriously than the occasion strictly required. No injuries were reported, beyond what Dahl described as “the ordinary scrapes, and one bruised ego, which will heal, and which I will not name, though he certainly knows who he is.”