MISQUAH — The Misquah Post 162 Legion baseball team picked up its first win of the season Wednesday, beating Birchard 5–3 at the Legion field under a single working light tower that, manager Sonny Dahl reported afterward, “held, on account of nobody leaning on the panel,” which around here passes for a game plan.

Cody Lindholm bounced back from a rough opener to go six strong innings for the win, allowing three runs — two of them in a shaky first — and striking out seven, retiring the last nine Birchard hitters he faced. “Wind was calmer,” Lindholm offered, when asked what had changed from the opener. The wind, again, was unavailable for comment, and is beginning to resemble a recurring character in the Post’s season.

Catcher Ben Aune drove in three of Misquah’s five runs, including a two-out single in the fifth that broke a 3–3 tie and a sacrifice fly an inning later. Aune now has the team’s only runs batted in across its first two games combined, a distinction Dahl called “a compliment to Ben and a to-do list for everybody else, and they’ve seen the list.” The rest of the order, he allowed, “is coming — they always come around the Fourth.”

The dark towers are not news, but the price of light finally is: the post received a written estimate this spring — roughly $7,400 to rewire and re-ballast the third tower alone — and has placed the figure “under study,” a parliamentary condition from which, members note, few figures have historically returned. The towers went dark one by one across the last decade, the third in the windstorm of 2019, and the games have simply contracted toward the surviving light, like the town’s own small astronomy. Attendance Wednesday was counted at forty-one, not including the row of trucks along the fence with their engines off and their radios on.

The lone light tower flickered twice in the seventh, prompting a brief pause, a longer prayer, and a held breath in the bleachers, but stayed on through the final out. The third and fourth towers remain dark, and have for years; their repair sits on a list that the Legion maintains and does not act upon. Post 162 (1–1) hosts Two Rivers on June 24 and travels to Sandy Lake on June 26, under, in all likelihood, the same one tower.