There was still a buzz in the backstretch air last Sunday morning, the day after Santa Anita’s opening day, when a reported crowd of 44,873 poured forth from the suburbs of Los Angeles to enjoy a brisk afternoon of Thoroughbred sport. From barn to barn, the mood was light. The energy of opening day provided a bracing tonic, which only made sense. If you work in show business, when the curtain rises, you like to see people in the seats.

When I think back on 2015, I will most remember three moments: the final 200 yards of the Belmont Stakes, the sound and feeling right after those 200 yards, and Saratoga on the Friday morning before the Travers.

That Friday morning never happens, of course, without that Saturday evening at Belmont. For some unknown reason, the sporting gods finally decided to smile on horse racing, a sport that has been great at building to a crescendo and impossibly bad at proper endings.

The National Thoroughbred Racing Association is soliciting its Twitter followers to vote early and often for the 2015 Moment of the Year. In a precaution against independent thought, there are only 10 “moments” listed from which to choose, ranging from American Pharoah did this to American Pharoah did that. However, unlike a certain fan poll taken recently by a national sporting magazine, the winning “moment” of the NTRA contest actually will win something, even if it’s only a turn in the white-hot glare of the Eclipse Awards dinner on Jan. 16 at Gulfstream Park.

As the opening of the Santa Anita meet approached in late December 2006, then-track president Ron Charles said the following: “We need to bring the fans back to the racetrack. It’s the only way we’re going to revitalize horse racing, by giving them the ontrack experience and in the process making Santa Anita that destination spot it once was.”

The first five races at Aqueduct on Dec. 18 were a dreary quintet, with just 34 horses contesting four maiden races and a $10,000 claimer. Yet they commanded the attention of horseplayers from coast to coast, who wagered a record $1.2 million on the pick five that day, more than the bet attracted on Belmont Stakes Day and six times the usual pool for a Friday afternoon at The Big A.

The heavy responsibility of deciding who gets an Eclipse Award falls upon the shoulders of 282 voters who received e-ballots this week. As one of them, I clicked the appropriate prompts and discovered, much to my delight, that a wave of memories welled up, not unlike Proust’s involuntary flood of remembrances unlocked by the nibble of a madeleine cookie dipped in tea.

“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me,” he wrote in Swann’s Way.

It was the year of American Pharoah. Anyone even casually knowledgeable about racing will look back at 2015 as the year racing shed decades of frustration for a number of moments of exultation through the racing talents of American Pharoah. He made an indelible imprint not only in racing, but he also crossed over to high name recognition with the mainstream public, with the television ratings for the races in which he competed reaching unprecedented heights compared to previous years.

Leandro Mora has no trouble remembering the maiden race at Del Mar on Nov. 15 in which the towering young colt Sorryaboutnothing tipped his ability with a game second-place finish going a mile and ended up in the winner’s circle on a pretty clear-cut disqualification.

Then again, it is a minor medical miracle that Mora can remember anything at all.

Two months before, on Sept. 18, to be exact, Mora was lounging at home near Santa Anita Park when, as he describes it, “I felt like someone hit me in the head with a baseball bat.”

Balloting for the 2015 Eclipse Awards officially began Wednesday, but responsible voters will wait until at least the evening of Dec. 26 to make their final choices: That is the date of the Grade 1 La Brea Stakes at Santa Anita, and the winner of that race could vault to the leadership of a division that currently has an unsatisfactory front-runner.

As I look at any race, the first question is: What Beyer Speed Figure will it take to win?

We will conduct a test here and report back with the results next week. I am going to predict the winning Beyer in four stakes races around the country, explain my conclusions, and try to determine which horses are most likely to get that figure.