Kelso won the Jockey Club Gold Cup five straight years, Forego won four consecutive runnings of the Woodward, and a host of good horses have dominated a particular event three years in a row, including Goldikova (the Breeders’ Cup Mile), Discovery (the Brooklyn and the Whitney), Native Diver (the Hollywood Gold Cup), and John Henry (the Oak Tree Invitational).

After a summer full of Songbird and California Chrome, Arrogate and Flintshire, Beholder and Stellar Wind, it’s finally Tepin’s turn.

On Saturday, the nation’s reigning female turf champion will be making her first start since taking the British Isles by storm in winning the Queen Anne Stakes on the first day of the Royal Ascot meeting last June. The setting is the Woodbine Mile, worth a million Canadian dollars, and Tepin faces seven, including the British invaders Mutakayyef and Arod.

We love small town news. Especially, small town animal news.

Late last month in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, reporter Ryan Masters got the story of a one-ton equine runaway who kept his people guessing for days.

“The desperado, a Clydesdale horse named Budweiser, or ‘Buddy’ for short, broke out of his pen in the area of Laurel Road near Highway 17,” Masters wrote. “He was busted out by his best friend, Lancelot, a Nigerian dwarf billy goat, according to owner Tamara Schmitz.”

Can a horse who has made a sufficient number of starts on the year, but who has not competed in a Grade 1 race all year, be considered one of the top members in a division where Grade 1 stakes opportunities abound?

It’s a matter of opinion, of course. But Da Big Hoss, who made Saturday’s Kentucky Turf Cup his fourth straight stakes victory and fifth stakes win of 2016, has forced the conversation.

Here’s what you get for $75,000 on a Sunday in September at Los Alamitos: five 3-year-old fillies going six furlongs from the stables of Richard Mandella, Bob Baffert, Doug O’Neill, John Sadler, and Phil D’Amato, who is fresh from his first Del Mar summer training title.

Okay, so Jonathan Sheppard didn’t win a race at Saratoga this summer. Big deal. His total was exactly one fewer than such household names as Nick Zito, Dale Romans, Michael Matz, Tony Dutrow, and Mark Hennig, and they’ll all live to fight another day.

Then again, Sheppard’s Saratoga blank made for one of those “Man Bites Dog” headlines. Halley’s Comet comes around more often. The last time Sheppard – who has been in the Hall of Fame since 1990 – went winless during Saratoga was in 1968.

There is no denying the cosmic connection of Del Mar and California Chrome. Three years ago, he won his first stakes race at the seaside track, taking down a little number called the Graduation. Two years ago, he showed up in the fall with a roll of the dice on the grass in the Hollywood Derby, which he won for fun to cement 2014 Horse of the Year. This year, it was his bang-zoom double in the San Diego Handicap and the Pacific Classic, a homecoming of epic proportions.

Patrick Valenzuela has been issued a license by the state of New Mexico and is scheduled for three rides at Ruidoso on Sunday, including the mount on Heat Stroke for track owner R.D. Hubbard in the $191,077 Rio Grande Senorita Futurity.

Only a heartless cynic would have anything but compassion for the long struggle Valenzuela has had with drugs and alcohol. At the same time, he is a fascinating character, with Hall of Fame stats and a “Law & Order” rap sheet that will confound racing historians for years to come.

It will be raining fillies. Good fillies, too. The best on both coasts, the stars of tomorrow, and the bedrock of the breed for years to come.

At least, that is how this corner prefers to enjoy the twin tests at Saratoga and Del Mar on Saturday, when the Spinaway Stakes will be presented for the 125th time (not a typo) and the 66th running of the Del Mar Debutante will follow a few hours later.

He didn’t look like the second coming of Native Dancer when he left California last week, and he looked pretty much like the same iron-gray colt when he walked off the Hubbard van Monday afternoon at Del Mar.

But what a difference a record-setting, 13 1/2-length win in the Travers can make, for it’s all eyes now on Arrogate, the son of Unbridled’s Song who dismantled America’s oldest stakes race last Saturday with the ease of a child crumbling a tower made of Legos.