MISQUAH — The Legion nine beat Brainerd 5–2 on Friday at Memorial Field, its only game of the week, and will take the Fourth of July weekend off as the league pauses for the holiday — a break Coach Dahl said “the boys need more than they’ll admit, and that I need more than the boys do.”

The win came on a complete game from the post’s senior right-hander, who scattered six hits and walked nobody, and on a three-run fourth that, by the account of the dozen or so in the bleachers, turned on a Brainerd error, a stolen base, and a Misquah bunt that “had no business working and worked anyway.” The post is over .500 for the first time since the spring, a fact Dahl declined to dwell on, on the grounds that “the minute you say it out loud you give it back.”

It came, as all home games now come, under two working light towers — the same two that have carried the field for years, throwing enough light to play and not quite enough to feel sure about a fly ball into the gap. The third tower, on the third-base side, flickered to life for eleven memorable seconds last month before returning to the dark, and the Legion’s lighting committee — three men and a clipboard — has been studying the matter ever since.

The study has lately acquired a number. An electrician out of the county seat looked the tower over and put the cost of replacing its ballast and wiring at roughly $7,400, a figure the committee received, read in full, and resolved to study further. “We’ve got the estimate,” said committee member Lloyd Bunde, who sits on the committee chiefly because his house faces the third-base side and the dark tower with it. “Studying it is free. Fixing it is seventy-four hundred dollars we don’t have. So we’re going to keep studying it, very carefully, for as long as it takes the number to either come down or stop bothering us.” Post 162 resumes the week after the holiday, under, in all likelihood, the same two towers.