MISQUAH — Post 162’s Monday home game against Pine City will go into the book as a 5–2 win in seven innings, and into local memory as the first ballgame anyone can name that was called on account of air. The umpires, the coaches, and the advisory conferred after the top of the seventh, agreed the haze had crossed from atmosphere into participant, and shook hands on it. Seven innings being a legal game, the win stands, and Post 162 stays on the sunny side of even with three weeks to play — though “sunny” did a lot of work in that sentence this particular week.

Cody Lindholm got the start and all seven innings, scattering five hits, striking out six, and working with a dusk that arrived an hour early and orange. “You couldn’t see the ball great,” he allowed afterward, “but that goes both ways,” a piece of competitive philosophy his coach declined to improve on.

The field itself did its part for the occasion. The one working light tower burned through the smoke with a visible cone around it, like a lighthouse that had wandered inland, and the pickup trucks along the outfield fence added their headlights to the cause on schedule, their beams laid flat across the haze in long yellow bars. Pine City’s coach, Randy Dolen, called the setting “the strangest good baseball I’ve watched in forty years,” and was overheard asking, not for the first time, how the light situation stands. It stands at one, with the next tower estimated at $7,400, a figure that has now outlasted several administrations and one windstorm.

The sparse crowd stayed to the end, coughing companionably. Post 162 is home again Friday, air permitting, and the forecast — reviewed with appropriate skepticism on the Lakes page — says the wind turns Wednesday. Sonny’s advice: come to the Friday game. Statistically, weather like this doesn’t repeat. Statistically.