The Belmont Derby looks like the 3-year-old male grass version of last week’s Mother Goose, a race where 90 Beyer Speed Figures are hard to find. The Mother Goose, by the way, was won with an 85 Beyer.

The form of the two European shippers is not easy to decipher, but it is not going to take a great horse to win since the Americans are mostly Beyer works in progress.

American Pharoah need not run another yard in the afternoon to secure his place in history. That story has been gloriously told, and the buzz of his Triple Crown triumph still lingers.

Then again, the greedy devils among us demand to see more and more American Pharoah. If it happens, fabulous, but until then, we must be content with drumming up support for any opposition that would at least make Pharoah’s life a little more interesting.

When exactly did being loose on the lead become a bad thing?

If you came of age playing this game as I did at Pimlico in the late 1970s and early 1980s, you very quickly understood the value of uncontested early speed. Thankfully, most of the jockeys riding in those days at Pimlico understood what the players knew. If a horse looked like clear speed, you could generally count on it and bet with confidence.

There is probably a simple truth behind the ominous old saying that bad things come in threes. For one thing, after two bad things have happened, a third can fry the brain. So, you bring things to a brief halt to absorb the blows before a fourth thing comes along, because there always will be a fourth thing.

The offseason in Southern California commences on Monday, the day after Santa Anita Park ends its six-month run, but as breathers go, it’s not much. Three days down is what the circuit gets before launching back into the parimutuel grind Thursday at Los Alamitos, which is barely enough time to get the oil changed, the lawn mowed, and a couple loads of washing hung and dried.

If you can’t have the big horse in a $500,000 event like the Gold Cup at Santa Anita, you might as well swarm the race with numbers, which is what trainer Peter Miller will be doing on Saturday when he sends out four of the 11 older runners entered in the 1 1/4-mile, main-track event topped by the Californian Stakes one-two finishers, Catch a Flight and Moreno.

How soon they forget. Los Alamitos Race Course is no longer the “Home of Chrome,” as banners and marquees proudly proclaimed in the thrill of the 2014 season. California Chrome is long gone, heading from England to Chicago when last heard from, and now the name in Los Alamitos lights is American Pharoah, as in “American Pharoah Trained Here!”

California Chrome will attempt the improbable on Wednesday when he runs in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot. The race is a clockwise mile and a quarter around two corners. The purse of 525,000 British pounds converts to around $820,000. The current Prince of Wales is Charles Philip Arthur George Windsor, first in line to the British throne and the former Mr. Lady Di, who is 66 and at this rate may never be king.

It was the day after the Belmont Stakes, and the ripples from American Pharoah’s Triple Crown triumph were still spreading across the waters of the game. Far from the celebratory residue at Belmont Park, I found myself in the office of a stately home tucked away in a wooded corner of Long Island, near the town of Glen Cove.

So now what?

Having a Triple Crown winner in our midst for the first time in almost four decades allows us to ask a question we haven’t heard since Affirmed was a 4-year-old in 1979: Where should the Triple Crown winner run next? In addition to celebrating American Pharoah’s present, we get to speculate about his future.