The Preakness draws the whole country to one race for two minutes. The favorite carries the money and the cameras. Most years, the favorite is where the crowd is right.

For fourteen years, before this was a business, I sent three horses for the Preakness to a small private group by email — the morning of the race, before the gates opened. Not the favorite. The three I believed the race would come down to, and the order I believed they’d finish. In all fourteen years, the winner has come from those three. Twice it was the last of them; in 2018 that horse won.

The three were not found by feel. They came from the same method, the same combination of factors, applied the same way every one of those years — the method that became 12 Horses Racing. Fourteen years, one engine, the winner among the three named every time.

First, second, and third, in that order. None of them the favorite. What you did with three horses named in the right order that morning was yours — a win bet, an exacta, a trifecta, however you cared to play them. The calling of the order was the thing.

And this year the calling was harder than any of the thirteen before it. The race did not run at Pimlico, where the Preakness has run in living memory; it ran at Laurel Park — a different track, a different shape, the finish line in a different place. A shorter run from the final turn to the wire gives a closer less room to get there, which changes who reaches the front. The field was larger than the Preakness usually draws. And the Derby winner was not in it. Every one of those makes the order harder to name — and the order was named through all of them at once.

In this lives the whole argument, told through one race. You do not stake it all on one horse. You name the few it will come down to, and you let the race decide among them. Over fourteen runnings, the winner has come from the three — more often from the first or second of them, twice from the third. It is a horse race. That is exactly why you hold more than one.

Those were horse selections, sent each year to a small private group. What members receive today is different: the races themselves — the few each weekend where the favorite is beatable and a longshot is live.