A writer is wise to stay away from the use of the symbolic as much as possible, given the obvious risks of looking like a failed poet or a stunted hack still trying to impress his ninth-grade English teacher.

Still, it’s hard to resist the temptation when considering two races offered on opposite sides of the continent on Saturday, both of them beginning with “P” and ending in “erby.” If they don’t stand for the way two of the most important racing states have answered modern economic challenges, nothing does.

LAS VEGAS – Handicapping is all about trying to predict the future, and the most anticipated future book for horseplayers is for the following year’s Kentucky Derby.

John Avello, previously at Bally’s Las Vegas and at the Wynn since 2005 (yowzers, has it really been that long?), puts up the first Derby futures in town every year. The current list for the 2012 Run for the Roses went up Sept. 8 with Alpha and Fire on Ice as the 50-1 co-favorites among the 126 horses listed, with Union Rags at 60-1 being the only other colt not in triple digits.

Let’s pretend for a moment that the idea of a Horse of the Year is important, truly important, and that the identity of the particular horse is revealed through a tortured set of priorities that combines both fact-based achievements and gut-level notions of history, fate, and romance. Where does that leave us now in the process for 2011?

Near the northern England town of Doncaster, just off the A638 down a shady lane, the Northern Racing College sits on 200 useful acres of Yorkshire forests and fields. From dawn ‘til dusk, the clop-clop of hooves on brick mixes with the hushed hubbub of young people cleaning stalls and tack, feeding hungry school horses, and riding out on the college’s generous gallops.

We got a glimpse of the looming war over Lasix in American racing last week when a New York state senator announced that he is sponsoring a bill to ban it in the state. If it is any indication of similar efforts likely to follow around the country, this is going to be a battle fought with misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric rather than science, common sense, or any consultation with people actually involved in horse racing.

Hold all tickets.

Horseplayers are used to that admonition, but some sports bettors learned that lesson last Saturday night when news broke that the USC-Utah final score was changed from 17-14 to 23-14, the significance of which was not lost on bettors as USC closed as an 8 1/2-point favorite. But let’s back up to set the scene.

It was confusing enough, driving in England, what with the steering wheel where my dachshund usually pokes her nose out the passenger side window. The accelerator was down there where it belonged, but the gear shift required operation by my left hand, which is normally about as useless as a placing judge in a walkover.

Fred Pope is back.

As if he ever left.

Pope, a determined Lexington, Ky., advertising executive, racing commentator, and iconoclast, issued another lengthy commentary on the state of the game this week – this one taking up six pages of single-spaced copy on a PC printer – continuing his decades-long effort to convince racing it is following the wrong road.

LAS VEGAS – Let’s get something straight: This city wouldn’t have turned into a ghost town on Sundays if the NFL hadn’t resolved its labor dispute.

Withdrawal is a terrible thing, especially when coming off an unbroken series of highs like those provided by Zenyatta. Gone cold turkey, with Zenyatta now in foal in Kentucky, you would think John Shirreffs would be waking up nights in a pool of his own sweat, skin crawling with invisible insects, demons dancing the ceiling above his bed.