Back in 2012, when I was really just getting started as a writer, I wrote a long piece for Grantland about my late father, my young son, and a history of Preakness Stakes past. It was about family, and the sport of horse racing, and the strange way sports can carry forward ghosts of the past well into the future. It was about life and death and all kinds of lofty ideas I rarely have the courage to write about anymore. At the time I wrote it, it was not all that hard to write. Trying to go back and read it today, it is nearly impossible for me to look at. Honestly, it is maybe to this day still my favorite thing I’ve ever written. It ends with a promise to my young son Gus: just wait.

Gus is now 14 years old. Just in the last year I think he’s grown three feet. He’s taller than me. He looks different. Everything people say about eighth grade is true. They start the year as little kids and they disappear sometime before the school year ends, replaced by gangly giants with deep voices. Whatever child I had when I wrote that piece in 2012, whatever child I had at the start of this school year, he is now gone, forever replaced by this teenager.

It’s not all bad, though. For all their foibles (and there are many), teenagers can do things little kids can’t do. Like ride in the front seat of the car. Or talk to you for three hours as you drive down the highway from New York to Baltimore about their hopes and dreams. Or listen to standup comedy on the radio with lots of curse words and inappropriate jokes, and actually get the funny parts and laugh. Or open up the Daily Racing Form and analyze a Grade 3 stakes being run on wet turf later that day at Pimlico, and tip you to a mortal lock who is 9-1 on the morning line.

Gus and I were headed to the 2024 Preakness at the invitation of my friend Stephen Panus. I had met Stephen’s 15-year-old son Jake at the Preakness back in 2019, about a year before Jake passed away in a tragic car accident. Stephen’s moving memoir of his son, “Walk On,” just came out, and I had recently read it. The memory I had of meeting Jake in that very same place where I was now introducing Stephen to my own teenage son, and the memory of my own recollections of the Preakness in my own family through triumph and tragedy, were an arresting juxtaposition.

I chose to not take the day for granted, and to cherish each rain-soaked moment. It would have been hard not to. As I wrote in my long-ago piece, “The track is heartbreak and triumph, misfortune and luck – both ours and the horses we cheer on. The track is the ever-growing totem of our lives. In a powerful way, the track is home.”

Gus and I managed to get hot early, hitting three or four races in a row. We drew the attention of people seated around us, who started asking us who we liked and tailing our bets. Gus really relished the game, and much like I did with my own father when I was his age, he refused to back whatever horse I liked, insisting on coming up with his own pick every time. Also like me, he had a preference for longshots. He was desperate to beat the chalk. I encouraged him.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have. A steady string of favorites (and an increase in our bet sizes) saw us giving back what we had managed to win earlier in the day a few races shy of the Preakness. By the time the post parade for the main event began, I was actually stuck. Gus and I played gin between races for a penny a point, and I was ahead. I tried to convince him to raise the stakes, but he refused. If I wanted to get even, I’d need to do it at the windows and not at his expense.

Gus had collected buttons of every horse in the field. He pinned one on himself for Imagination, his choice to win the race. But he kept the others nearby because he said he planned to swap it out for the winner if Imagination didn’t win. Shameless.

Seize the Grey winning the Preakness Stakes May 18. (Eclipse Sportswire)

We decided to go all in, and shoved the remainder of our bankrolls on our respective picks. For me it was Just Steel. As we stood trackside and watched the horses approach the starting gate, I marveled at Seize the Grey. “Now that’s a pretty horse. Why didn’t we pick that one?” I ran back to our table to look at the Racing Form. Gus laughed at me. “It’s too late! They’re about to go off!” Naturally Seize the Grey won. It wouldn’t have mattered. Even as I stood over the Form in those seconds before the gates opened up, I didn’t love what I saw.

When my dad was probably about my age, he and his friends were tired of losing money at the track. They ordered a videotape that promised to unlock the secrets of handicapping to them. I remember them sitting in our living room watching it on the VCR, in rapt attention, asses perched on the edge of the couch. The video was essentially a primer on how to visually assess a horse’s condition: look for dapples, front wraps, sweat, erratic behavior, things like that. They started hanging out in the paddock, clocking the coats of the horses before each race, leaning over the rail during the post parade with binoculars, trying to get a sense of a horse’s health or lack thereof. They fared no better than they had when their heads were buried in the Daily Racing Form. I knew as a kid, as my son probably knows now, that dad was a fool. I knew back then that sometimes the extra effort became a law of diminishing returns. Sometimes a simple glance at the horses is enough. You don’t have to stare at their coats with binoculars, or dive deep into their splits from a year ago, or track their pedigree to the 17^th century or whatever. Sometimes you can just take a look at them — a long, hard look — and that’s enough to see what you need to see.

We packed up our deck of cards and our dozens of buttons and bid our farewells to our newly minted racetrack friends, and we headed for the parking lot. I bored Gus with stories of past Preaknesses, when the lines were unbearable, the facilities were in disrepair, and the crowds were unruly. He tuned me out, I think. But this wasn’t so bad, I told him. This was a hell of a nice day. I hadn’t taken it for granted. I wondered to myself whether he had.

I mentioned to Gus that this was the final time they’d run the race at Pimlico before they rebuilt the track. That got his attention. “Then it’s really good we got to come,” he said. “Because this is the last time the track will ever be like this.” He was right, and it was somehow the first time that day it occurred to me. I gave him a long, hard look. I loved what I saw.