MISQUAH — Misquah staged its first official Fourth of July boat parade on Saturday, and by every practical measure it was an improvement: orderly, safe, no-wake, the loon chicks unbothered, nobody swamped. We are glad it went well. We are also, we confess, of two minds about it — which, on a question like this one, is not indecision but honesty.

For decades the Fourth’s flotilla was the purest kind of community event, the kind nobody plans. Boats simply drifted out at dusk because it was the Fourth and the lake was there and everyone felt like it, and the thing assembled and dissolved on its own, governed by nothing but mood and cooler capacity. It was, in the truest sense of a much-abused word, spontaneous — and genuine spontaneity is rarer and more precious than we usually stop to admit.

There is a real gain in formalizing it, and we will not pretend otherwise. A start time means families can plan. A no-wake rule protects the chicks and the dignity of the day. A named parade can be handed down, on purpose, to children who will one day lead it themselves. These are not small things, and the committee that built the parade in a church basement last winter did the town a genuine service. We mean that plainly and without our usual hedging.

But there is a loss, too, and we would be failing the town to pretend there isn’t. Something that happens because everyone chooses it, freely and all at once, is a different and finer thing than something that happens because it appears on a schedule. The first is a community revealing itself; the second is a community administering itself. Both have their place. But you cannot schedule spontaneity, and a town that dutifully formalizes every one of its happy accidents may discover, in time, that it has quietly stopped having them.

Our counsel, for what it is worth, is to keep both. Let the official parade run at noon, with its lineup and its grand marshal and its sensible rules. And let the boats still drift out on ordinary July evenings, ungoverned and unjudged, simply because someone felt like it — because that impulse, the one no committee created and no committee can, is the one most worth protecting. Make the spontaneous official if you must. Only do not let the official crowd out the spontaneous. The lake is surely big enough for both. And so, we would like to think, are we.