MISQUAH — The Lakeside summer softball team ran its record to 5–0 with an 11–4 midweek win, but the historic development, again, came not from the field but from the cooler: thanks to the parents’ committee’s recently doubled Co-op order, the Pike finished a game with leftover orange slices for the first time in anyone present could remember.

The surplus — roughly a dozen slices, by the count of the parent on cooler duty — was distributed along the fence to the younger siblings, “which is what a surplus is for,” one committee member said, in a tone several bystanders described as quietly, deeply triumphant, the tone of a person whose unpopular budget proposal has been spectacularly vindicated in public. The committee, emboldened, has resolved to maintain the doubled order “through the playoffs, conditions permitting,” and to revisit, at season’s end, “whether we were ever really at risk, or whether we overcorrected,” a review no one expects to actually occur.

On the field, the Pike continue to hit, and Coach Halvorsen continues to decline to discuss the playoffs, citing the well-known and strictly enforced local dangers of doing so out loud before July is out. Off the field, the team is, at last and on the record and for the younger siblings besides, adequately fruited. They play again Saturday, oranges assured, morale high, and the cooler, for once, ahead of demand.