Henry Cecil doffed his Frankel cap and led his visitors through a side door of his home at Warren Place, in the horse crazy town of Newmarket, then made a quick right turn into his study.

“That’s a dinosaur’s egg,” he said, reaching into a corner cabinet to produce a petrified sphere. “And that’s a prehistoric shark’s tooth.”

LAS VEGAS – This is the seventh weekend of the college football season, and each team will be at least halfway through its 12-game schedule, but in a way the race for the national championship is just beginning.

Here’s how the free market has worked in California for breeders of Thoroughbred racehorses.

Two decades ago, in 1993, there were 3,860 foals registered with The Jockey Club as California-breds. This figure was second only to Kentucky’s 7,008 foals and represented 11.4 percent of the total U.S. foal crop of 33,820.

In 2010, the most recent year for which reasonably complete Jockey Club figures are available, the California foal crop was 1,935, representing 7.7 percent of a 25,212 U.S. population.

A week into October, the question of who will be America’s Horse of the Year remains exactly the same as it was four months ago: Can anyone unseat I’ll Have Another, who ran his last race in the middle of May?

American racing fans don’t think too much about the Arc de Triomphe, if they think about it at all. Any race with “prix” in the name comes immediately under suspicion as strangely foreign, and what’s 4 million euros in real money anyway?

America’s owners and trainers haven’t been exactly wild about the French race either. Their idea of adventure is going for a milllion-dollar pot in West Virginia. International racing, for most American horsemen, means Woodbine.

Hoosier Park is back in the national news again on Saturday, and this time for all the right reasons.

An attractive bunch of 3-year-olds has hit town in search of first prize in the $500,000 Indiana Derby, with the $200,000 Indiana Oaks and eight other stakes fleshing out the marquee program of the meet.

Baseball fever. Have you caught it?

The “third rail” of American politics is Social Security. Touch it with the intent to tinker, and you can kiss your election chances goodbye. You’re fried.

Thoroughbred racing has had its own third rails, institutions that seemed to exist above reform, impervious to discussion no matter what the evidence demands.

John Henry, the horse for whom Su nday’s John Henry Turf Championship at Santa Anita is named, ran 83 times over eight seasons, won 39 races at distances from four furlongs to 1 1/2 miles, and earned what was then a record $6,597,947.

Clearly, he was a fictional character.

The past week was a rare and remarkable one for New York racing in that the positive just may have nosed out the negative to provide a net gain for the sport and its horses.