It’s a win as tall as the sequoias, as deep as the Grand Canyon, as broad as Death Valley.

Forgive the hyperbole — we are giddy that our divided, sclerotic Congress came together to approve the Great American Outdoors Act, signed this week by President Donald Trump.

The law, which passed the House 310-107 and the Senate 73-25 and had backing of 850 organizations, will enable the National Park Service to work on $20 billion in deferred maintenance at national parks, ensuring preservation of our national heritage.

Called the most consequential conservation bill in a generation by the Sierra Club, it provides $900 million a year to the Land and Water Conservation Fund and makes that a mandatory spending program. The fund was created in the 1960s and was to be financed with lease payments from energy development on federal lands, but that money was consistently used for other purposes.

While Nebraska doesn’t have a national park and only a little national forest, we all can enjoy visiting places such as Yellowstone, Badlands, Yosemite, Arches and so many more. Some of the money from the new law also goes to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Indian Education, and will be used for parks and playgrounds in urban areas.

With nearly a billion dollars a year in spending and a massive backlog of maintenance, the act provides infrastructure jobs — the type of spending that helped lift the country from the Great Depression and built many civic assets still in use.

All this good was achieved after 20 years of advocacy, with House sponsors ranging from the late John Lewis to Nebraska’s Jeff Fortenberry. It was pushed to the finish line by two Western senators in tough re-election races: Cory Gardner of Colorado and Steve Daines of Montana. They met with Trump in March and won his support. It’s as if the political system worked.

Writer and historian Wallace Stegner called our national parks “the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.”

So there’s your good news for August. We now return to 2020, already in progress.