The bags hit the boards with a sound somewhere between a thud and a whisper. Fifty-two teams. Twenty-six courts painted on the parking lot asphalt behind Hyalite Brewing. The league runs eight weeks, double elimination, $40 a team plus a two-drink minimum that nobody enforces but everyone respects.

Commissioner Dale Hargrove arrived at 5:30 p.m. with a measuring tape, a level, and a clipboard that has seen seventeen seasons. He checks the distance between boards every week. Twenty-seven feet. Regulation. The boards themselves are a mix of hand-painted plywood, composite sets from Scheels, and one pair that a guy named Turk welded from quarter-inch plate steel because he said the wind takes the light ones.

“The wind always takes the light ones,” Turk said. He drives a 1998 Tacoma with a camper shell and a sticker from a rafting company that went under in 2012. He works maintenance at the high school. Throws left-handed. Has not missed a Thursday since the league started in a dirt lot behind the old feed store on Rouse.

First round pairings went up on the whiteboard at 6:15. Team “Corn Stars” versus “Baggers Gonna Bag.” “Huskers” versus “Toss Like a Boss.” The defending champs, “Midvalley Milling,” drew a bye. Their captain, Jenna Colton, sells crop insurance and throws a flat bag that slides the last six inches like it has brakes. She won last year with a torn meniscus she got stepping in a gopher hole at her kid’s tee-ball game.

Spectators lined the chain link with camp chairs and growlers. A few dogs. A baby in a noise-canceling headset. The brewery lights clicked on at 8:43, one by one, the kind that hum. By 9:30 the parking lot smelled like hop smoke and mosquito coil.

Hargrove tallied the final scores on his clipboard. Zero disputes. The level stayed in his truck. The tape measure never came out again.

Next Thursday the boards go down at 5:30. The tape measure will come out again.