MISQUAH — For approximately eleven seconds during Friday’s pregame warm-ups, the long-dark third light tower at Memorial Field hummed, brightened, and threw actual light across right field — the first time it had done so since the towers were last counted, which is the only way anyone around here keeps track of the towers. The bleachers, by several accounts, applauded, and one man is said to have stood.

Then it went dark again, and stayed dark, and the game proceeded under the established two, the applause curdling into the kind of knowing groan the field specializes in. The flicker is being treated by the Legion’s lighting committee — three men, a clipboard, and no budget whatsoever — as evidence rather than progress. “We’re studying the event,” said committee member Lloyd Bunde, who is on the committee chiefly because his house faces the third-base side and the dark tower with it, and who has therefore stared at the problem longer than anyone. Studying the event, regulars understood, is the committee’s settled and time-honored way of saying no.

The third and fourth towers have been dark long enough that no one present can say with any confidence when they last worked reliably, though estimates cluster, vaguely and probably generously, somewhere around the Obama administration. No formal repair estimate has yet been sought — “we’re not there yet,” Bunde said, “we’re still at the stage of agreeing it happened” — and the committee, true to its word and its nature, will continue to study. Post 162 plays Friday against Pine City, under two, before a crowd that will watch the third tower out of the corner of its collective eye, hoping, the way the field has taught it to hope, for another eleven seconds.