MISQUAH — The Loon Ridge men’s league banquet ran from 6:30 to a few minutes past eight Thursday at the Northern Tap, and the item that was not on the agenda came up at 7:41, which is nine minutes earlier than three separate people had predicted to this newspaper.

The background, briefly, for anyone who spent July indoors: during the smoke week the league played a night on the front nine only, because the back nine could not be seen, and posted the best scoring average of the summer. Head pro Greg Mattson ruled in July that those scores count toward the season points race, asterisked in pencil, with the asterisk to be reviewed at the banquet.

It was reviewed. A member whose season standing was affected by those scores moved to strike the asterisk entirely, on the grounds that the scores either count or they do not and that a mark in pencil is “half a decision.” The motion was seconded immediately by a man who had said in this newspaper in August that he enjoyed the subject.

Then Dale Ryberg, who won the season points race, stood up and objected to his own apparent advantage.

Ryberg did not play the smoke-week round. He was not on the course that night and his points were unaffected by it in either direction. His objection, delivered in full and recorded here because four people wrote it down: “If you take the pencil out, then I won a points race that had a funny night in it and nobody can tell from the book. Leave it in. I want the man who reads that book in ten years to see there was something strange in July and that we knew it.”

Mattson then ruled that a motion to strike an asterisk requires the assent of any member whose standing the asterisk touches, including a member it touches favorably. This is not a rule. There is no such rule, in this league or any other, and Mattson did not claim there was. He said it in the tone of a man reading it off a card, and nobody challenged him, because it was 7:52 and the meat raffle was at eight.

The motion failed for want of assent. The asterisk stays, in pencil, and will be reviewed again at next September’s banquet, which means this newspaper will be writing this story again in fifty-one weeks.

The traveling trophy — a plated putter mounted on a board, won by eleven different men since 1994 — was awarded to Ryberg, who cannot collect it, because it has been in a basement in Brainerd since 2021 and nobody has asked for it back. Ryberg said he would take the board when it turns up and that he is in no hurry.

The meat raffle ran eleven minutes late and cleared $310.

Forty-one people attended, which is eight more than last year and which Manager Randy Dolen attributes to the asterisk having been in the newspaper twice.

The banquet itself ran the way it has run since the nineties: a meal at 6:30, season awards at about seven, the traveling trophy, the raffle at eight. Mattson gave out low round of the year, most improved, and a hand-lettered certificate for a man who played every scheduled night including the smoke one, which drew the loudest noise of the evening and which several people noted afterward was itself a comment on the matter under discussion.

Ryberg, reached Monday, declined to discuss the objection further and said only that a book ought to say what happened. Asked whether he expected the asterisk to survive next September, he said he had no idea and that he would probably be there.