Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Lars G. Doubleday, aka Doug Peterson and Brad Wilber. Their last Stumper was in January of this year. Today’s puzzle is another solid Stumper. The cross that began to reveal the puzzle to me: 24-D, letters, “It’s covered for strollers” and 32-A, six letters, “Bardic king.” I’m surprised that I got 24-D first. I just thought has to be.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

4-D, seven letters, “Always-open merchant.” A better clue might be “An answer that needs to be banned from crosswords.” I can’t stand the word.

8-A, seven letters, “Clogs, for example.” An example of this puzzle’s ambiguities.

17-A, seven letters, “Less likely to split.” C’mon, man. The answer appears nowhere in the OED and it barely registers in the Google Ngram Viewer.

20-D, nine letters, “Literally, ‘Children of the Covenant.’” I learned something.

27-A, four letters, “About ninety-one yards of a football field.” A novel way to clue a familiar word.

43-D, seven letters, “Genre of graphic novels.” Oh! Cool.

44-A, nine letters, “Quartet in Mississippi.” As much as I like the answer, I think the clue is fiendishly arbitrary.

47-D, six letters, “Local.” Unexpected.

55-A, twelve letters, “Resumption after an interruption.” Nicely colloquial.

68-A, seven letters, “Back down?” Oof.

My favorite in this puzzle: 10-D, four letters, “‘Congratulations!’ message source, maybe.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.