MISQUAH — The dark stain on the Main Street sidewalk outside the Northern Tap — the lasting evidence of Al Lundquist’s ill-advised Fourth-weekend sprint, which has now resisted three separate washings — will remain where it is, the council having resolved last Tuesday to resolve it later.

The matter produced the evening’s only genuine debate. Alderman Pete Hagen proposed the city rent a pressure washer and be done with it, a motion grounded in the reasonable position that a town ought to be able to clean its own sidewalk. Alderman Lloyd Bunde countered that the stain should be left “as a lesson,” though he declined, when pressed, to specify the lesson, or its intended student.

A brief exchange followed on the general subject of whether Main Street ought to memorialize a fifty-eight-year-old man’s decision to recreate a footrace from 1991 on a $40 bet. Alderman Bunde felt that it should. The gallery, sparse but engaged, appeared to agree, which Alderman Hagen noted was precisely the problem.

In the end the council did what this newspaper had, in its editorial pages, explicitly urged it to do, which is nothing. The question was deferred to the fall, on the reasoning that the stain may weather away on its own by then, and that if it does not, it will still be there to argue about, having gone nowhere. Mayor Vik framed this as prudence. It is also, we note without complaint, our idea.

Mr. Lundquist, reached at his kitchen table, said he had no strong feelings either way. “I won the bet,” he said. “The stain’s the town’s problem now, not mine.” He added that he had been asked to run it again at the fair and had declined, which he characterized as the real news, and the first sensible decision of the whole affair.

The stain remains visible outside the Northern Tap, roughly forty yards short of where the 1991 route is remembered to have ended, and can be viewed by anyone with reason to be on that stretch of sidewalk, of whom there are, on a given day, a great many.