So here it is, a little more than 72 hours out from post time for the Breeders’ Cup, and I haven’t written a thing about it.

It would be silly of me to pore through past performances and hazard handicapping guesses.

I can’t write about what’s going on on the backstretch or in the morning, because I’m not there.

Besides, the blogosphere and Twitterverse (God, I hate both of those words) and the websites of mainstream media are alight with electronic updates that appear quite literally by the minute.

So, by way of explanation and perhaps to ward off losing my Thoroughbred blogging license for dereliction of Breeders’ Cup duty, I figured I’d write a post about the Big Event out west this weekend.

And then—oops!—I realized that I wrote it last year.

I’d sketched out a few ideas in my head earlier today…and there they all were, posted a year ago. Replace Ginger Punch with Sara Louise, Wait A While with Forever Together, Belmont with Aqueduct…and you pretty much get exactly what I’d have written today….if I hadn’t looked back to see what I’d written last year.

So then I started to think, maybe I’m just by turns indifferent and irritated about it because it’s all the way out in California and I can’t go; and because lots of my friends are there; and because here I am, in gloomy grey Brooklyn, while they’re all frolicking—OK, and working–in sunny Arcadia. Arcadia! Arcadia, with its classically lyrical implications. Brooklyn’s–and Aqueduct’s–implications are neither classical, nor lyrical. Maybe it’s such sour grapes.

So what if it the Breeders’ Cup were at Belmont this year? Would I be more excited? Would I be writing feverishly about it, trying desperately (and likely in vain) to find some morsel of story not covered ad nauseam elsewhere?

Maybe. But I might also be even crankier, because although some of my favorite horses would be running less than 30, and not 3,000, miles from me, I still wouldn’t be able to see them, because they’d be running on Friday, while I’m at work.

True, I’d be less concerned about some horse swooping in to win on an unusual surface and capturing fluky end of year honors. And true, I’d lose the disdain for holding the event at the same track for two years in a row.

But I might be even grumpier, because instead of clearing my Saturday in anticipation of a great day (singular) at the races, at one of my favorite tracks, at which equine stars of all sorts would turn out…I’d plod through my Friday, knowing that a short distance away, some of my favorites would be running, and I wouldn’t be able to watch them. Though they’d be only 20 miles away, for all the good it would do me, they had might as well be in…Arcadia.