Flatter: As always, the racing summer moves way too fast

This is the one weekend every year when racing gives us the perfect alignment of the triple bucket list. The final days at storied Saratoga overlap with opening week at quirky Kentucky Downs overlaps the ocean holiday at idyllic Del Mar.

It is kind of like when the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars. This coming from the old guy who grinds about musical references from years that don’t start with 2.

Closing weekend at Saratoga carries the same melancholy we endured as kids on the last day of summer vacation. It comes in the blush of that instant classic of a Travers between Fierceness and Thorpedo Anna with supporting players like Dornoch and Sierra Leone and uncredited cameos from the likes of Honor Marie. The glow of that memory just adds to the ambivalence of these next few days.

This is when we all should agree with Andy Serling, the lovable lightning rod who scoffs at all the daily whinging that starts in the morning with the weather and field sizes and off-the-turf declarations and ends with ticket-tearing criticism of jockeys, stewards and alleged track biases.

“It always feels great to be at Saratoga,” he says.

Against the 21st century accentuation of the negative, present author included, Serling’s quote should be crocheted on a sampler and hung with the late Harvey Pack’s nightly sign-off, “May the horse be with you.”

If Ferocious runs off and wins the Grade 1 Hopeful on Monday, he will provide the screenshot that could carry us through the winter. Mind you, it is going on 63 years since Decidedly won the Kentucky Derby. That is significant, because he was the last Derby-winning colt who broke his maiden on the Saratoga dirt.

It is about a paragraph too late to say don’t put the bandwagon cart before the untested horse. Still, may whomever wins the Hopeful spring eternal.

One time zone and a horseplayer’s world away from Saratoga, there is the annual all-turf mini-meet at one of the two Thoroughbred tracks in America with a right-hand turn. After Santa Anita’s downhill course, there is that undulating meadow that is Kentucky Downs. Apologies to anyone who considers that little backstretch bend at Los Alamitos to be a third.

Since they have not built much more than a three-story, wooden lookout tower near the finish line and an overpriced hotel at the top of the stretch, they can pile up the money and stuff it inside the purses in the notch on the Kentucky-Tennessee line.

It feels like any reference to a race at Kentucky Downs must, by legislative fiat, include a dollar sign, a number and the word million. Those occasionally but necessarily are followed by fine print that says a big chunk of that pot is reserved only for horses from the home commonwealth.

The bargain rate for shippers notwithstanding, there is still a ton of money on the table for everyone. So much so that track management stepped up its recruiting of overseas horses by hiring the International Racing Bureau based in the U.K. That is the United Kingdom, not the University of Kentucky. This means the big green space between Bowling Green and Nashville is on its way to rivaling or even supplanting the Arlington in Virginia Million as a waystation for horses needing a firm springboard to big, worldwide racing dates late in the year.

A colleague who spent the past week at Saratoga and years at Del Mar asked me if he should make his first-ever trip to Kentucky Downs before going home out west. My answer was an unhesitant yes, because it is the closest thing we have to the racing experience in Europe. The Dueling Grounds never will be confused with Swinley Bottom, but every good racing fan should experience it at least once.

Finally, there is Del Mar, which offers its signature Pacific Classic on Saturday. Actually, the true imprimatur of Del Mar is opening day, when 93 or so percent of the crowd could ignite a breathalyzer from 10 paces. That makes it less like a signature and more like a 2 a.m. tattoo.

We don’t have Flightline to look forward to this weekend. And now it turns out we do not have Adare Manor. Bob Baffert scratched her when she “tied up a little after her gallop” Thursday. So much for her version of the trendy battle-of-the-sexes script. They should slip notes into the programs that say, “At this performance, the role of the Adare Manor will be played by a Baldwin sister,” if there are any.

I find my mind wandering to next weekend, when the Del Mar Futurity could showcase a Kentucky Derby contender. California Chrome, American Pharoah and Nyquist came out of that race, so who knows?

Del Mar is the last bastion of what racing used to be in California. The industry is rotting in the rest of the state faster than political collegiality across the country. How it manages to get through 31 racing days without a casino or sports betting or historic horse-racing contraptions is a miracle.

When the sun sets for the last time in nine days on the Del Mar summer season, it will feel like that last day when the “Saved by the Bell” crew got their bonus checks for working at the Malibu Sands Beach Resort. Zack said good-bye to Stacey, who eventually hooked up with Kevin James before becoming a game-show host, and they lived wistfully ever after.

This will be the first summer in 17 years that I have not gotten to Saratoga or Kentucky Downs or Del Mar. I blame getting old and being really comfortable at home with my wife and our seemingly endless kitchen. And wine cabinet.

For the young at heart, here is hoping you get to one of these tracks this weekend. Better yet if you get a race as good as the Travers.

That showdown for the ages nearly ruined my 48th annual campaign to stamp out August. Using my definition, though, Fierceness’s hang-on-for-dear-life win over Thorpedo Anna actually happened on the 55th of July.

By the end of the weekend we will be ridded of this too-hot, holiday-free, exhibition-football month. Thankfully it will be gone for another 334 days.

I can see us lost in the memory. August slipped away into a moment in time, ’cause it was never mine.

I guess I really can channel something from a year beginning with 2.

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.