The last three critical preps for the Breeders’ Cup Classic were run on a very busy Saturday of stakes action, and two of the three were won by heavy favorites. But if you thought that helped bring the Classic picture into sharp focus, you might want to think again.

There is no substitute for showing up at the racetrack. This is written somewhere in stone, despite the fact that racetrack attendance, even at the most popular resort tracks, has leveled off at numbers unthinkably low when compared to bygone eras.

Except for a handful of supercharged events, people are staying away from racetracks in droves. A tedious recitation of all the reasons why would serve no purpose on a fine Sunday afternoon, which apparently belongs to the NFL anyway. Let’s just leave it at knowing what everyone else is missing.

Michael McCarthy says he is having the best year of his training career because good horses have intersected with kind fortune. So, he figures, if you’re walking around lucky, why not go out and buy a lottery ticket?

Everything that happens over the next two weekends will be viewed through the prism of the Breeders’ Cup, to be run Nov. 2 and 3 at Churchill Downs. Performances will be sliced, diced, and projected to the scene down the road in Kentucky, where track condition, weather, and the looming mid-term elections will undoubtedly play a role in how the horses run.

The preliminary Beyer Speed Figures for Saturday’s card at Parx Racing were posted early Sunday, and the numbers for the two top races of the day – the Pennsylvania Derby and Cotillion – are big.

The Pennsylvania Derby received a preliminary Beyer of 107. That means McKinzie ran six Beyer points higher than his previous career-best, and did so off an absence of slightly more than than six months. It also means that Pennsylvania Derby runner-up Axelrod ran 10 points higher than his previous career best.

Mark Twain, as he aged, became obsessed with the fading of his memory, to the extent that he patented “Mark Twain’s Memory-Builder,” advertised as “A Game for Acquiring and Retaining All Sorts of Facts and Dates.”

Twain, who published “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” one year before his board game, described memory as, “… a curious machine and strangely capricious. It has no order, it has no system, it has no notion of values, it is always throwing away gold and hoarding rubbish.”

At a cool million apiece with Grade 1 glory to boot, the Pennsylvania Derby and the Cotillion Stakes will dominate Saturday’s entertainment and fuel a festive afternoon at Parx Racing in suburban Philadelphia. One race will be run strictly for fortune, while the other holds the promise of fame.

Welcome to the giddy buzz of Christmas in September – better known in racing as the Keeneland yearling sales – and its parade of colts and fillies bred like Hapsburgs and Romanovs, price-tagged and on display with bright eyes, good hearts, and untroubled shins.

In a perfect world, these beautiful babies would defy the odds and go on to great things beyond their residual value, in blissful defiance of what has become a 2018 season fraught with the loss of way too many horses who were supposed to carry the load.

As if any proof was needed that the Breeders’ Cup is now the undisputed near-term focus of the sport, consider that the sharp folks at the Wynn Las Vegas Race and Sports Book released not one but two sets of updated odds last week for the Breeders’ Cup Classic.

Before taking a peek at Wynn’s latest, remember that its odds are a blend of action already taken and exposure it is willing to accept and are not entirely comparable to a conventional morning line.

There is no Eclipse Award for resilience or persistence. But if there were, and the floor was open to nominations, the owners, trainers, jockeys, and fans of Suffolk Downs deserve to be on the short list.

The once-proud jewel of New England Thoroughbred racing has been reduced in recent years to a few Saturdays and Sundays each season, hardly enough to sustain a vibrant industry. As recently as 2014, the meet ran for 65 racing days, and before that the Suffolk Downs season was a going concern of more than 100 racing days.