The Thursday night rec basketball league tipped off at the Emerson Center gym last night with eight teams and a waiting list of twelve. The league runs ten weeks, single elimination playoffs, and a rule book that has not been updated since 2003. Commissioner Dale Hargrove said the only change this year is the snack schedule.

Games are forty minutes running clock. Fouls are called by the honor system, which works about as well as the honor system at the self-serve firewood pile on Huffine Lane. Teams carry sponsors like Bridger Orthopedic, Last Best Plumbing, and a new one called Adaptogenic Elixirs that pays in product.

“The line held on the baseline screen, that’s why we won,” said guard Marcus Tull of Bridger Orthopedic, icing a knee that has not been right since the 2014 city tournament. Tull works nights at the water treatment plant and shoots left-handed because a snowmobile accident in 2011 fused his right wrist. He scored eighteen points.

Adaptogenic Elixirs lost by four. Their point guard, a second-year physical therapy student from Colorado Springs, drove the lane six times and finished once. The other five attempts met the outstretched arms of Last Best Plumbing’s center, a man named Duane who owns a backhoe and plays in hiking boots. Duane had twelve rebounds and zero apologies.

Halftime featured a half-court shot contest sponsored by a realtor who has sold three houses on Durston since April. Nobody made it. The prize was a gift certificate for a roof inspection.

The gym smells like floor wax and the particular sweat of people who stretch for twenty minutes before a game they will not remember by Sunday. The bleachers held fourteen spectators, three toddlers, and a golden retriever named Biscuit who understands the pick-and-roll better than most fans.

Playoffs begin in November. The championship trophy is a two-by-four mounted on a piece of slate someone found in the Gallatin River.