Was It Your First Triple Crown?

[Merlinsky]

I know there are a range of ages on this board, and some of us just saw the first Triple Crown winner in our lifetimes. I just wanted to know who else experienced that and what it was like for you.

There's something surreal about having watched history as many times as we have with the archived footage of Triple Crowns past, then an addition being made right in front of our eyes. It hadn't been changed for us and we'd run through this many times, for decades at this point. It was in permanent ink almost even though you tell yourself someone can do it and you hope that they might. That was hypothetical, this is real. Your brain has to rewrite what it knows about something pretty significant. Everything felt like it was inevitable for some reason. His stride was perfect, every gallop was right, everything he was doing was the way I'd felt it would go when it finally happened. A 2yo champ just like I thought it might be. The way the race set up and how he swung into the stretch felt like it was all coming together as it was meant to do. It was pretty extraordinary for everyone, I'm sure, but it knocks you back to see it unfold in real time when you never have before.

One thought I had in the wake of the victory as Baffert went to speak to her: I'm glad Penny Chenery and John Nerud got to see another one.