Welcome
I face this problem almost daily even worse because down here it would have been sold as a Super Roo or Emu Runner or some local name, hence the measure with rope trick mentioned to the previous poster.
If you have the old belt and the ends sit properly into each other, so you can be confident that a 2" length or so did not fall off then just measure the belt end to end and then round down to the nearest inch.
When you get a deck belt over 100" long an inch either way means absolutely nothing.
kevlar fiber belts do not stretch much , they wear thin on the coontact sides so sit deeper in the pulley , so become loose which is misinterpereted as having stretched .
The reason why you get lengths like 142 21/64" is because we are living in the the computer age where it is all about an exact number and not about understanding what you are doing .
Every belt maker has free desktop app so the "design engineer " can drop in the position of the pulleys, engine Hp & loads and the app spews out a number .
So when a commercial customer rings desperately requiring a belt in the middle of a 10 acre mow, I go through my stock and come fit the right belt if I have it or the nearest under size if not .
Never had a problem and in quite a few cases they ask for the same belt to be fitted next time , particularly if it was a cheaper belt .
Usually just so long as you use the same end use belt so don't put a transmission belt on a deck all will be fine.
The caveat on that is if your deck has a heavily serpentine belt run with small flat idler pulleys.
When this is the case, the fevlar fibres are in a different place and a different size ( Thinner & closer to the middle ).
Can't help you with the belt run but if you pull the deck out and photograph it from above some with a lot more experience than me will be able to sort it out for you.
There is just so many ways you can run a belt so that all of the pulleys will have sifficient contact & not slip.