BALTIMORE – It will take no time for folks to belabor the point that Cloud Computing got an absolutely perfect trip in his upset victory in Saturday’s Preakness Stakes here at Pimlico. This has already happened on social media and will continue into the night.

But while Cloud Computing did indeed benefit from a great setup, I hope people avoid the trap of denigrating this colt for it, or painting him as some sort of lucky opportunist. Cloud Computing is a quality horse and, in fact, had a break owed to him.

The winner of the Preakness Stakes 100 years ago was Kalitan. Don’t fret if the name is not familiar. It wasn’t in 1917 either, at least not before he won the Preakness.

Arrogate won’t be running until the summer. Unique Bella is on the shelf, and Mastery is still recovering from surgery. Songbird is close to a race, though it isn’t certain where or when, and his Derby horse disappeared at Churchill Downs without a trace. What’s a rider to do in the meantime? Twiddle his thumbs? Take up macramé? Tackle his memoirs?

How about win the Preakness?

The modern Triple Crown tilts heavily toward the Derby, with its demand for 20 horses and its overstuffed hype aided and abetted by a compliant media. The idea that an owner would skip the first race with a top horse in favor of the second has become an absurdity on a par with those pigs who keep trying to fly.

As of Sunday morning, the extended weather forecast for Baltimore is good – a bit steamy midweek, but good. AccuWeather says the only chance for precipitation there all week is on Friday, when a couple of showers are “possible,” and the National Weather Service has no precipitation at all listed for Baltimore all week.

Both weather services say no rain for Baltimore on Preakness Saturday, with high temperatures cooling to the upper 70s.

There’s always a cake. A cake and a sign, upon which is displayed a four-digit number to be celebrated when a jockey reaches a particular milestone.

The sign is no problem. It can be prepared well in advance and stored in a clean, dry place for display at the right moment. The cake, though, is another deal.

“Every race I rode, they’d bring out the cake,” Chantal Sutherland said on a quiet off day this week. “When I didn’t win, they’d roll it back in. Roll the cake out, roll it back in. After a while, I’m thinking, ‘That cake’s got to be getting kind of stale.’ ”

There has been an ongoing celebration this year to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Man o’ War, foaled in Kentucky on March 29, 1917. Light a candle.

Man o’ War was widely hailed as the greatest racehorse to appear on the American turf – at least until Secretariat came along. The debate will never be resolved, yet there is no denying that Man o’ War had a name recognition far beyond the racing world that made his exploits synonymous with contemporaries such as Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, and Jack Dempsey.

Unless you win the race or your horse gets hurt, it is hard to take a 20-horse Kentucky Derby seriously, especially when it is run on a track that looks like a peanut butter slurry.

However, that does not stop the chart-callers at Equibase from parsing the melee down to the smallest dips and dives. Leave it to them to turn the Charge of the Light Brigade into a dry and tidy eyewitness report straight out of “Dragnet.”

You can talk all you want about how Always Dreaming had a perfect stalking trip in Saturday’s Kentucky Derby. You can snicker all you want about what a cliché it has become when people say that horses with positional speed such as Always Dreaming make their own good trips. And you can lament all you want about how the sloppy track conditions at Churchill Downs over the weekend may have compromised so many horses in the Derby who had no experience on such footing.

You can do all of that. But I will respond by saying, very nicely, that I don’t want to hear it.

Why?

Anybody can train the winner of a Kentucky Derby. Anybody.

You can be born in a Georgia log cabin like Tom Smith, a Yorkshire mining village like John Longden, or a Havana barrio like Lazaro Barrera.

You can win it in your first try, like Ben Jones, Frank Childs, or Jim Fitzsimmons, or in your only try, like Don Cameron, George Conway, or Neil Drysdale.

A winning trainer can be as young as Hollie Hughes, who was 27, or James Rowe Sr., who was 24, or wait until deep into the twilight of a satisfying career, like Charlie Whittingham, Mack Miller, or Art Sherman.