It wasn’t hard for Art Sherman to recall the time the shoe was on the other foot.

“We ran that gray horse, Carthage, in a race they put on at Golden Gate for Lost in the Fog coming back as a 4-year-old,” Sherman said recently. “I didn’t think I could beat him, but my horse was doing real good, and we were getting some weight. So, why not run?”

The announcement this week that Love the Chase, dam of California Chrome, will be bred next year to American Pharoah’s sire Pioneerof the Nile set the imagination alight. North America’s richest racehorse would now be step-brother to racing’s most recent Triple Crown winner. Or something like that.

Breeding news abounds at this time of year. High-priced racemares have been changing hands like hot stocks. Broodmares in foal are counting the days. Young stallions are sniffing the air, getting in the mood for their first rites of spring.

And then there is California Chrome.

It’s easy to see why some have already fallen for Mastery. He just won the Grade 1 Los Alamitos CashCall Futurity on Saturday by more than seven lengths in his first start around two turns to make it 3 for 3 in his young career. He’s by Candy Ride, which makes you think he will only appreciate added distance. And he’s trained by Bob Baffert, who knows a thing or two about winning big races.

Some things are okay to forget. Darrel McHargue would be forgiven if the 1981 Hollywood Gold Cup had disappeared completely into the mists of memory. Instead, he recalls every yard, every move, everything that resulted in his narrow victory aboard the New Zealand horse Caterman over the Cal-bred Eleven Stitches, as well as the disqualification that followed. At $500,000, the Gold Cup was one of the richest races run in North American that season.

For a guy who started the year with his barn blowing down, Peter Miller has done okay.

Early last January, on a quiet weekday afternoon, Miller’s main barn at the San Luis Rey Downs Training Center was hit with what meteorologists termed a microburst that razed half the roof, dismantled stalls, and sent the stable crew scrambling to soothe the jangled nerves of the four-legged residents. It’s easier to say the place was trashed by a tornado, so let’s go with that.

There should be very little sympathy for those railing against the downgrading of the Wood Memorial, Blue Grass, and Mother Goose on the list for 2017 released this week by the American Graded Stakes Committee of the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association. To take offense at such perceived slights is to admit that you take the list seriously in the first place.

The decision to downgrade the Grade 1 Blue Grass Stakes and Wood Memorial to Grade 2 status in 2017, which was announced Friday by the American Graded Stakes Committee of the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders’ Association, has elicited a visceral reaction in some quarters.

Somebody, bring a camera.

The parade of riders filing out of the Del Mar jockeys room at a quarter past three on Sunday afternoon will be a sight to see. No one will need a program to match names and faces.

This is no Breeders’ Cup confluence, where all hands are required on deck, or a Kentucky Derby, where everyone shows up just in case. It’s a cool day in early December at a track hardly known for hot toddies and holiday décor, offering a purse that will change no one’s life. And just look who is showing up for the $300,000 Matriarch, at one mile on grass.

Chad Brown was planning to be at Del Mar – home of the 2017 Breeders’ Cup – this weekend when half a dozen of his runners will populate the $300,000 Hollywood Derby and the $300,000 Matriarch. Really, he was.

“I’ve never been to Del Mar, never won a race there,” Brown said Thursday from New York. “And I wanted to come out. But …”

Here it comes. East Coast excuse No. 487 for a trainer blowing off a stakes date in California. Okay, go ahead.

The first four dirt races at Aqueduct last Saturday were a figure-makers dream. The final times made sense in relation to what was expected, and the apparent outlier, Elate, a first-time starter, emphatically announced herself as a stakes horse with a dominating 12 1/2-length win. Then they ran the Remsen, the fifth dirt race and the third 1 1/8-mile race on the card.