There are golf courses that are built, and there are golf courses that are recovered. The Lido, in Nekoosa, Wisconsin, belongs to the second kind, and it carries itself like something brought back from the deep. The first Lido was born from a bold act of vision. On a barrier island just off Long Island, C.B. Macdonald looked at what he called a "horrible 115 acres of sea swamp and quagmire" and saw, somehow, a great golf course. He was right. What he made from that muck became one of the finest courses in the world and one of the greatest feats golf architecture has ever produced. Then history did what history does. The Lido eventually fell victim to the Depression, and after World War II a housing development took its place. What remained was longing, a course that golf romantics could only dream of playing. For decades they dreamed of going back in time. A few years ago, two of them, Michael Keiser Jr. and Chris Keiser, decided that dreaming was not enough. They found a flat piece of ground across the street from their Sand Valley resort and set out to re-create Macdonald's design as closely as they could. They brought in architects Tom Doak and Brian Schneider, and they brought in Peter Flory, a digital designer, to help bring a vanished course back to life. Old genius, read through new eyes. Macdonald's recovered design may well inspire many golf architects, but the techniques used to build it may prove even more influential than the design itself. What they made feels strikingly authentic. That is the strange gift of the place. You stand on Wisconsin ground, a long way from the Atlantic, and yet the course seems to remember the ocean. It has the bearing of something older than its years, as if Macdonald's lines had simply found their way home. But a re-creation also makes you feel the original's ghosts more sharply. Consider the eighth hole on Long Island. It sat directly on the beach beside the Atlantic and was considered the greatest Biarritz in the world. It was also troubled from the start. The waves crashed against it, it was a beast to maintain from the beginning, and eventually a hurricane washed it away. The finest example of its kind did not last long, a hole that lived on borrowed time and lost the loan. There is a melancholy beauty in that, and it lingers over the whole idea of a Lido reborn. The old Lido had its weather moods, too. In tournament days, morning tee times were coveted, because the wind was usually calmer early and the course played about five shots easier. That small fact says a great deal about Macdonald's original. Its difficulty rose and fell with the wind, and a player's fortune could turn on nothing more than the hour he teed off. Getting onto The Lido today asks a little patience. It is a private club, though it opens its doors to Sand Valley resort guests on a limited basis, Sunday through Thursday. Tee times are not as easy to come by as they are on the resort's fully public courses, and that seems right. A course that lived for decades only in the dreams of romantics should not be entirely casual to reach. Walk it once and you understand what the Keisers were chasing. Not a copy, exactly, but a second chance for something the world was not finished with.