Winter and spring are the time for dreaming. Maybe that eye-catching maiden win, the gutty allowance score, revealed a 3-year-old with raw material that might be sculpted into a Derby horse.

Summer’s the time to get real. And a race like Sunday’s Maxfield Stakes, carded for seven furlongs and worth $250,000, suits those 3-year-olds who didn’t really stay two turns or hit their ceiling in graded stakes-level competition – horses like Flood Zone and Captain Cook, both of whom traversed the New York spur of the Triple Crown trail earlier this year.

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – Trainer Todd Pletcher has been training regularly over the Oklahoma strip since shipping the majority of his stable to Saratoga earlier this spring, but he switched venues on Friday. He worked 13 horses over the main track during the course of the morning, including the Suburban-bound pair of Locked and Antiquarian.

The two horses were a contrast in styles in their final serious preparation for the Grade 2 event next Saturday.

Southern California-based trainer Mark Glatt’s small Churchill Downs invasion this weekend could end in victory.

Glatt, for lack of great local opportunities this time of summer, he said, sent six horses to race during closing weekend of the Churchill spring meeting. Judge Miller in Sunday’s Hanshin Stakes is the last of them and might turn out to be the best Glatt bet of the weekend.

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – Sovereignty, who has bounced out of his decisive victory over Journalism in the Belmont Stakes with a series of eye-catching gallops on the Oklahoma training track the past two weeks, finally returned to the work tab on Friday. He breezed an easy half-mile in 51.27 seconds, per Daily Racing Form, over a track that has been very cuppy and on the slower side of late.

Sigh No More, a 3-year old filly trained by Brendan Walsh, will make her second start in North America in the $100,000 Boiling Springs Stakes on Sunday at Monmouth Park. The usual adjustments for European shippers have come naturally to her so far.

“They come here from those big galloping tracks in Europe and it’s a big change for them,” Walsh said. “But I thought she ran a decent race and she’s been working very well since. It’s a decent race at Monmouth with a couple nice fillies, but I think she’s one of them.”

Sunday Girl’s ability to handle the turf will be the key when the two-time stakes winner tries grass for the first time Sunday at Aqueduct in the $125,000 John Hettinger. The Hettinger is carded at six furlongs and lured a field of seven New York-bred fillies and mares that also includes the Miguel Clement-trained multiple stakes winners Silver Skillet and Loon Cry.

The John Hettinger, race 8, is the fifth race in the pick six sequence that features a $45,780 carryover.

Three weeks after she finished a game second in the Grade 3 Summertime Oaks at Santa Anita, Howin will race against older fillies and mares for the first time in a Sunday allowance race at a mile at Los Alamitos.

The race ends a streak of three stakes appearances for Howin since she won a maiden race last October.

Trained by Bob Baffert for Charles and Susan Chu’s Baoma Corp., Howin is part of a field of six in the day’s first race and is the lone 3-year-old filly in the lineup.

Off a flashy debut win, Saul Elliott ships in from California for Sunday’s $225,000 Bashford Manor Stakes at Churchill Downs.