MISQUAH — The men’s league has its ruling. The nine-hole scores posted during smoke week — the best average scoring night of the summer, achieved in the unexplained absence of the back nine — will count in the season points race in full, head pro Greg Mattson announced Friday, with a single condition: each is entered in the book with an asterisk, in pencil.

“The committee reviewed the matter,” Mattson said, the committee being Mattson, “and found that the league played the holes that were available, which is all the rules ask.” He acknowledged the competitive question raised by the missing back nine — home of the water on eleven, the wind on fourteen, and the trees several members describe as ambulatory — and addressed it with the instrument now entered in the record. “The asterisk says what everyone was going to say anyway,” he said. “This way it only has to be said once, and in pencil.”

Reaction split along predictable lines. Members whose season bests were posted that night called the ruling “judicious.” Members whose standings suffered by comparison called it other things, at the Northern Tap, at length. One member has formally inquired whether the asterisk could be upgraded to ink, citing the library’s recent precedent; Mattson has taken the inquiry under advisement, which league veterans recognize as its final resting place.

The pencil asterisk will itself be reviewed in September, when the points race concludes and the season banquet convenes at the Tap, historically the venue where the league’s controversies go to be retold rather than resolved. The geese, whose seventh-fairway position was unaffected by any of it, have issued no statement and hold all the ground they held in June, which is to say all of it.