MISQUAH — Friday’s home game against Sandstone was everything Monday’s wasn’t: clear, cool, fully visible, and long. Post 162 and the visitors traded a 3–3 tie through nine innings of the kind of baseball that keeps a small crowd in its seats past bedtime, and in the bottom of the tenth, with two out and a runner at second, Ben Aune lined the first pitch he liked into the left-center gap, and the season’s closing stretch had its signature win, 4–3.

Aune’s credentials for the moment are a matter of public record: he has driven in a healthy share of what runs this team has scored all summer, a distinction his teammates treat as a law of nature. “If there’s a run standing on base,” said one, “Ben considers it his ride home.” Aune himself, asked what he was looking for on the pitch, gave the answer of a man who has been interviewed by this newspaper before: “A strike,” he said. “It was one.”

Cody Lindholm, working on normal rest for the first time in two weeks, gave seven strong before handing the game to the bullpen, which held the line through three innings of traffic. The one working light tower performed without its smoke halo for the first time in a week and was, several spectators noted, somehow less romantic and more useful. The trucks along the outfield fence attended as required; their headlights, for once, were decorative.

The win keeps Post 162 comfortably on the sunny side of even with two home dates left — Tuesday against Hinckley and the season closer a week Friday — and section seeding to be sorted by results elsewhere, which Sonny declines to calculate in print on the grounds that arithmetic has jinxed better teams than this one. Come to the Tuesday game. The air is free again, and the baseball, lately, has been worth breathing it for.