MISQUAH — The homecoming parade is still at 4, the coronation is still at 5:15 in the gym, the first Doris Knutson Spelldown is still at 6:30 in the same gym, and kickoff against Pine City is still at 7. A joint logistics meeting Monday afternoon changed none of that, and produced, in ninety minutes, an agreement about where cars go.

Football traffic will be directed to the north side of the school grounds. Spelldown participants and spectators will be directed to the south entrance by the gym doors. Two signs and four cones are involved. The activities director and the Spelldown committee both described the meeting afterward as productive, using that word, separately, within an hour of each other.

What did not happen is any movement on the schedule. The committee offered in early September to move the Spelldown to the following Friday; the athletic office declined; the committee then declined the decline. Neither position has changed and both are defensible, which is the part of this that never makes it into the telling.

The athletic office’s case is that homecoming is scheduled a year out, that the parade route is permitted through the city, that the coronation is a sixty-year tradition in that gym, and that a football schedule is set by a conference and not by a building. The Spelldown committee’s case is that the bee honors a woman who taught in this district for thirty-seven years, that it was placed on the last Friday in September in the spring without objection, and that they are not going to be the reason a coronation happens in a cafeteria.

Both of those are true. Neither of them moves a clock.

The practical situation on the twenty-fifth, then: the gym empties after the coronation at about 5:45, the Spelldown seats at 6:15 and starts at 6:30, and the football crowd walks past the gym doors on its way to the field at about a quarter to seven. Spelling will be occurring, audibly, as they pass. The Spelldown committee has asked that the gym doors be closed during rounds. The activities director has agreed and has noted that the doors are heavy and that this will work.

A second facilities walk-through is set for Wednesday, and the school wants a final traffic and program plan in hand before the end of the week. Superintendent Dale Brandt, who has stayed out of it, was asked whether he intends to intervene. “Two groups of adults who both want to hold something for children on the same night are not a problem I need to solve,” he said. “They need a parking plan. They have one now.”

Phil Brekke, who pronounces, has been asked about the conflict four times by this newspaper in three weeks and has given the same answer each time, which is that he will pronounce whenever somebody gives him a gym. He has been practicing since August. The word lists are copied. Study lists went home the second of September.

The two decisions made Monday are smaller than they sound and more useful than they look. Football traffic north means the field lot and the overflow along the fence line; Spelldown traffic south means the twelve spaces by the gym doors and the gravel strip behind. On an ordinary Friday neither group would notice the other. On the twenty-fifth, with a parade ending at the school at about a quarter to five, both lots fill in the same forty minutes.

The parade is the part nobody has solved and nobody has raised. It steps off downtown at 4 and ends at the school, which means the floats and the fire trucks and the band are unloading into the north lot at almost exactly the hour the Spelldown’s families are trying to park in the south one. Wednesday’s walk-through is expected to take that up. It is the single most likely thing to go wrong and it is the one item on which both committees are, so far, in complete agreement.

Sixty-one children have entered the Spelldown, grades three through six, which is more than the committee planned for and which changes the seating. The gym’s bleachers seat about four hundred; the committee is now estimating a hundred and eighty spectators for the bee and the athletic office is estimating six hundred for the game, and those numbers do not fit in the same building at the same time, which is why the two of them are in the same building at different times.