MISQUAH — The Lakeside summer softball team improved to 4–0 with a pair of wins this week, outscoring its opponents 41–12 over four games — though the larger development, by parental consensus, came off the field, where the orange-slice budget has at last been formally reviewed, debated, and increased.

The team had been working through every orange the parents brought, plus the agreed-upon spares, by roughly the third inning of most games, leaving the late innings, in the words of one parent who asked not to be named in a matter still before the committee, “dangerously under-fruited, and you could see it in the dugout, you could see the morale go.” “You cannot field a fourth inning on no oranges,” the parent said. “It’s eleven-year-olds in July. The oranges are not a luxury and they are not a snack. The oranges are the program. You take away the oranges and you find out fast what was holding the whole thing together.”

The parents’ committee met, deliberated with what attendees called “appropriate, frankly excessive seriousness,” and voted to double the standing order from the Co-op, which has agreed to set aside a case each Wednesday. The motion passed without opposition, though one member is said to have asked, and been gently overruled on, whether grapes might “stretch the budget,” a suggestion the committee recorded and declined. Coach Curt Halvorsen, asked about the team’s actual softball, said the Pike were “hitting everything and catching most of it,” and that he had learned across many summers not to come between the parents and the citrus, “because that is a fight a coach does not win, and should not pick, and I’ve seen men try.” The Pike play Wednesday at home — oranges, for the first time all season, assured.