BALTIMORE – At 4:30 Saturday afternoon, quiet and hot on the northwest edge of the Pimlico property, Mage, the Kentucky Derby winner, was out of his stall, his groom slowly walking him around the shed row in the Preakness barn.  A little after 7 Saturday evening, out on the racetrack, Mage lost the second leg of the Triple Crown in great part because of a walking pace.   As National Treasure sauntered a half-mile during the middle portion of the race in 49.54 seconds, Mage had fallen a few lengths behind. The race turned into a sprint for the finish, the fourth quarter going in 23.58 seconds, and Mage simply could not catch two of his rivals, pacesetting National Treasure, the narrow winner over Blazing Sevens, who got first run on Mage.  “The horses in front, you could see they were going easy,” said Gustavo Delgado Jr., assistant to his father, trainer Gustavo Delgado. “Those horses, you don’t beat them like that. They always fight. They fight when they go fast; imagine when they go so slow. They were galloping, but we knew that – we knew that would happen.”  :: Bet the Belmont Stakes with confidence! Join DRF Bets and get a $250 deposit match bonus, $10 free bet, and FREE DRF Formulator! A good measure of speed came out of the race when First Mission was scratched Friday. Coffeewithchris, the only plausible early challenger to National Treasure, couldn’t keep up, even at a crawling tempo.  The irony: Mage, who typically walks out of the gate, broke alertly enough Saturday and got into the race the quickest he’d done since winning his career debut, a seven-furlong maiden contest on Jan. 28. Castellano plunked his mount in the pocket, going around the first turn drafting just behind National Treasure and pressing Coffeewithchris. Mage lost that spot down the backstretch. Red Route One made an inside move between the five- and six-furlong poles, displacing Mage, as Blazing Sevens took an outside route to mount an early challenge. By the half-mile pole, Castellano was three paths wide, following Blazing Sevens, a few lengths off the leader. Mage came to the quarter pole still in range, changed leads belatedly, and was outrun to the wire.    “My horse responded very well, but I couldn’t catch up to those two horses,” Castellano said. “They opened up and the race, it was over. I expected to win today. I’m not disappointed in my horse, I think that’s a really good horse, Mage.”   Mage was a 15-1 shot in the Derby, where he got a great run from the back of the field into an enervating pace. He was favored at 7-5 in Baltimore, becoming the 14th Derby winner since 2000 to lose the Preakness.   There will be no Belmont Stakes for Mage.   “Definitely not. The Belmont is not under consideration,” Delgado Jr. said.   Mage’s connections took their time committing to the Preakness after the colt’s relatively surprising win in Louisville. They said from the start the colt wouldn’t work during the two weeks between the Derby and the Preakness, walking the fine line that must be traversed by every Derby winner – do enough to stay fit and sharp, don’t do so much that the quick turnaround saps the horse.  “We took the shot, and it was worth the shot,” Delgado Jr. said. “The horse seems to come back good. He’s lightly raced. We’ll regroup.”  Mage, a son of Good Magic, came a long way in a short time, enduring a tightly compressed schedule to emerge a Derby winner. Off only the maiden sprint win, Mage went into the Grade 2 Fountain of Youth, where he hit the gate at the start, rushed into a solid pace, was caught wide, and still held on for a commendable fourth. His trip in the Florida Derby was tougher than victorious Forte, the 2-year-old champion of 2022, and Forte needed the length of the homestretch to run him down. Mage could have regressed after that performance; instead, he went forward again. Was the Preakness a step back? Quite possibly. Mage wasn’t able to maintain his position down the backstretch, which proved costly, and even fighting against the race flow, he still had a shot at the quarter pole.   Delgados junior and senior, waiting for Castellano to bring Mage back for unsaddling, looked grim. It was a far cry from the Derby, where the Delgados, Venezuelan expatriates, celebrated the first Derby win for Castellano, a native Venezuelan. Two weeks and a little more than 600 miles between Churchill and Pimlico. Memories fade fast, but don’t disappear.  “The horse ran a huge race,” Delgado Jr. said. “He still won the Kentucky Derby. Nobody is going to take that that away from us.”  :: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.