PINEDALE — The Misquah Post 162 Legion baseball team opened its season here Friday night with a 6–2 loss to Pinedale, a result Post 162 manager Sonny Dahl attributed to “a long bus, a short bench, and one very tall outfield fence in left.”

The Post, fielding several players just off the Lakeside High season and short two regulars away at a wedding, fell behind early and never caught up, surrendering four runs in the third on two walks, a hit batsman, and a double that one-hopped the aforementioned fence. Misquah finished with five hits, stranded six, and turned, in Dahl’s accounting, “exactly one ball we should have turned, which is not enough to win a game and is about what you’d expect from a club that’s had three practices.”

Starting pitcher Cody Lindholm took the loss over four innings, allowing five runs, three earned. Asked what had gotten away from him, Lindholm pointed to the wind, which he described as “swirling — in off the lake, then back the other way, all night, never the same two pitches running.” The wind could not be reached for comment and has, across Lindholm’s young career, declined every opportunity to defend itself.

Misquah’s runs came in the fourth on a two-out single by catcher Ben Aune that plated two, the only real noise the Post’s bats made all evening. Dahl praised the at-bat and not much else, saying the team “looked like a club that’s had three practices, which is exactly what we are, and we’ll look like a ballclub around the Fourth, which is exactly when we always do.”

Post 162 returns home Wednesday against Birchard at the Legion field, first pitch 7 p.m., pending the field’s one working light tower — the others having gone dark in stages no one quite remembers — which Dahl said “should hold, so long as nobody leans on the panel,” a sentence he delivered as instruction rather than joke.