MISQUAH — The Tuesday men’s league at Loon Ridge played nine holes instead of its customary eighteen this week, a concession to the air-quality advisory recommended by head pro Greg Mattson and adopted by the membership with a speed Mattson described, carefully, as “responsive.”

The shortened round produced the league’s best average scoring night of the summer, a result with two available explanations. The first is arithmetic. The second, advanced by no one on the record and by everyone at the Northern Tap, is that the back nine — home of the water on eleven, the wind on fourteen, and the trees that several members have described as “moving” — is where the league’s scores traditionally go to suffer, and this week it went unplayed. “The front nine is a fair test,” said one member, whose card showed a season best. “It’s just a shorter conversation.”

Mattson, asked whether nine-hole scores would carry full standing in the season points race, exercised the diplomacy for which he is retained by general manager Renée Fontaine. “The committee will review it,” he said, the committee being Mattson, and the review being a thing he did with his eyebrows while saying it. A ruling is expected by Friday, or whenever the complaints equalize, whichever is first.

The course itself reports no smoke damage beyond aesthetics. The flags hung limp in the haze, the water hazards achieved what Mattson called “a prestige-television look,” and the geese — whose relationship with the club is documented extensively on the letters page of this newspaper’s past editions — were unaffected, unimpressed, and present.