LAS VEGAS – This Sunday is the NFL’s equivalent of the Final Four, and of course the No. 1-seeded New England Patriots and Atlanta Falcons are rolling along . . . oops, not so fast.

ARCADIA, Calif. – A little after 6:30 last Monday evening, in her modest home in the shadow of the Tehachapi Mountains northeast of Los Angeles, Priscilla Clark was pulling a pizza out of her oven when the phones began to ring, her cell and then her hard line. Her first thought was the same first thought that occurs to anyone living in a deeply rural outpost, far from ready access to the services the rest of us take for granted.

“I thought the neighbor’s house was on fire,” Clark said, the neighbor in this isolated ’hood being a mile or so distant.

Say you owned a mare named Sangue, like Charlene Parks did lo these many years ago, and by the end of the 1983 season she had won, over a two-year span, the Vanity, the Matriarch, the Yellow Ribbon, the Beverly Hills, the Santa Maria, the Ramona (now the Mabee), the Chula Vista (now the Clement Hirsch), and a smattering of lesser stakes, along with placings in half a dozen other major events and the top rating among older fillies and mares at 1 1/8 miles on the 1983 Daily Racing Form Free Handicap.

Eclipse Award? Nope.

The 2011 season started out just fine for Robby Albarado. Riding over familiar terrain at the Fair Grounds, the Louisiana native won a race on New Year’s Day and was looking forward to what the coming weeks and months would hold.

Then it turned Jan. 2.

LAS VEGAS – For the second straight year, wild-card weekend in the NFL was pretty wild.

The World Thoroughbred Rankings released on Tuesday serve as the only truly international summing up of the previous year’s racing activity. The list is comprehensive in that it includes all of the world’s major racing jurisdictions, and is broken down into distance, age, and surface categories. Weighing all of the data available presents a monumental task. The WTR committee of national handicappers and racing secretaries is to be congratulated for sifting through it all and coming up with a semblance of accuracy.

The mason jar full of dirt and water, shaken not stirred, was settling into layers, just like Rich Tedesco said it would. At the top rested the water. Then came the silt, and beneath that the sand. Behold, in miniature, what the Santa Anita main track had become.

Even accounting for the effects of climate change, El Nino, or any other weather anomaly you want to name, there was no contingency plan in place to deal with the inevitable impact of 15 inches of rain in barely a week’s time hitting the freshly laid course at the end of December.

TUCSON, Ariz. – As long as David has his slingshot, Goliath has no chance.

David in this scenario is Bill Christine, one of the nation’s finest sportswriters, twice winner of an Eclipse Award, five-time winner of the Red Smith award for coverage of the Kentucky Derby, and for 24 years the star racing writer of the Los Angeles Times. He also has a National Turf Writers’ Walter Haight award and Pimlico’s Old Hilltop trophy on his shelf for contributions to racing journalism and is one of the most skilled wordsmiths in the business.

ARCADIA, Calif. – Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention lately will concede that if the game is going to be saved – at least in terms of public interest in the sporting aspects – it is the fillies and mares who will do the saving.

The colts are hopeless, slaves year after year to the same old Kentucky Derby mantra, a zero sum enterprise that favors pomp over serious circumstance and tends to devour its young. Woe be to that poor animal who wins the Derby these days, for he is soon to be ancient history as a racehorse.

Even chronic complainers like this one couldn’t find much to squawk about in the announcement last Thursday of the 36 finalists for the 12 equine Eclipse Awards that will be handed out in Miami Beach on Jan. 17. In a year when only the Horse of the Year and perhaps the male sprinter titles seem to be in doubt, no horse deserving a divisional title was omitted, and any lingering debate involves marginal quibbles about distant second- or third-place finishes within those divisions.