Okay, that’s it. We’ve been had. I want to see a birth certificate, some DNA, a lip tattoo – anything that will back the claim of John A. Nerud that he is about to turn 102 years old.

All it takes is a brief conversation with Nerud and you know it’s a lie. He comes off a razor-sharp 74, maybe. At most, a fiesty 85. But on the brink of 102? Pull the other one.

For starters, what’s a guy who is almost 102 – Nerud’s exact birth date, according to legend, is Feb. 9, 1913 – doing with a 3-year-old Thoroughbred who just cruised home to win a maiden race at Aqueduct last Friday?

I was trying to think back to the last time all the best 3-year-olds returned the following year with ambitious campaigns planned. Perhaps it is because we are sitting on the 25th anniversary, but the year that comes to mind is 1990, when Sunday Silence and Easy Goer, after their four 1989 meetings, including epic finishes in the Preakness and Breeders’ Cup Classic, stayed in training, with tracks around the country hoping to attract the pair to run against each other.

Jamie Osborne is not a masochist. Really, he’s not. He’s a nice guy with a properly droll, British sense of humor who describes himself as an “overrated jockey and underrated trainer from sunny Upper Lambourn,” a horsey town located about 70 miles west of London.

The Jockeys’ Guild should have had a pretty good week.

On Saturday night at Gulfstream Park, guild members Javier Castellano and Drayden Van Dyke put a polished image on display in graceful, heartfelt acceptances of their Eclipse Awards for the 2014 season.

On Monday, the guild’s directors and available members assembled in Florida to do their annual business while taking advantage of the afterglow from Eclipse Awards festivities. They were rewarded with a handsome turnout of industry celebrities, including past guild presidents Jerry Bailey and Chris McCarron.

Nearly 50 years ago in his “Complete Guide to Thoroughbred Racing,” the groundbreaking granddaddy of modern handicapping books, Tom Ainslie instructed readers to view with extreme skepticism any horse who had not raced in the last 14 days. Sharp and in-form horses should be racing at least that often, he said, and a quick runback was a sign of a thriving horse.

Imagine his surprise the other night when Jay Robbins was sitting at home in Carlsbad, Calif., not far from Del Mar, innocently enjoying the broadcast of the Eclipse Awards on HRTV and getting a kick out of California Chrome being named 2014 Horse of the Year.

As the Chrome crew made its way to the stage to accept the golden trophy, led by trainer Art Sherman and co-owner Steve Coburn, Robbins heard broadcast announcer Larry Collmus introduce the newly crowned champion as “the first-ever California-bred to win the Eclipse Award for Horse of the Year.”

How soon they forget.

Pierre Bellocq remembers it as if it were yesterday instead of more than 40 years ago, when he occasionally strayed from his work as a horse-racing cartoonist for The Morning Telegraph to provide The Philadelphia Inquirer an image of political content. Both publications were owned by Walter Annenberg.

The great rivalries give Thoroughbred racing a heightened sense of its own reality. There was Kelso and Gun Bow, Dr. Fager and Damascus, Sunday Silence and Easy Goer, and if the game is lucky, there will be a brand-new, three-cornered feud among Shared Belief, Bayern, and California Chrome played out over the season ahead.

Now that we’ve debated the merits of the finalists for Eclipse Awards, let’s turn to handicapping how the awards will actually turn out when the envelopes are opened at Gulfstream Park on Saturday night. Let’s play a mythical pick 12 for the dozen equine categories, and I think we can do it with just 12 combos.

(The five human categories comprise a more difficult pick five. I’ll sit out.)

Awards shows, by their very nature, are hard to make exciting – unless you are getting an award or know somebody who is or don’t know the outcome for a very important award.

The 2014 Horse of the Year decision falls into the third category because a reasonable case could be made for any of the finalists.

If you like Main Sequence, you can support it by saying he was perfect in four races, all Grade 1, culminating with a win in the Breeders’ Cup Turf.