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The crowd stuck through the Indianapolis 500 despite the heavy rains.

Then, on lap 162, Franchitti again rushed to the front on the restart. Meanwhile, behind him, Marco Andretti and Buddy Rice were colliding, sending the 20-year-old Andretti upside-down. Incredibly, Andretti walked away from the gruesome wreck with nothing more than a limp. “I’m a very lucky man,’’ Andretti said after the race. “To come away from this with just a bruise, I’m really lucky.’’

The accident brought out another yellow flag.

And then the rains came again, finally washing out a long, strange race that saw a little bit of everything.

Lucky man, Franchitti. He wins the Indy 500 and goes home with Ashley Judd.

“I still can’t believe it,’’ Franchitti said later. “I think the disbelief started, first thing, when the rain started. 'Oh, it’s raining pretty hard here guys.’ The downpour start. They came on the radio, 'Checkers next time by.' I’m thinking it’s going to b e difficult even to get there because the car was (hydro)-planing, it was so wet out there.

“Then across the finish line, it was just disbelief coming into the pits. I came in really slowly. First of all, I didn’t want to crash the car on the in-lap. The crowd stayed throughout the rain delay and got absolutely soaked. I just wanted to enjoy that moment, just to have a little time to think.’’

Clearly, the sport and the race are not what they once were, due in large part to the hard-headedness of the men who run the rival Indy Racing League and Champ Car. It’s a crime the way the sport, and this event, have been hijacked by people who should have open-wheel’s best interests at heart. But in the end, the Indianapolis 500 is almost always bailed out by the Indianapolis 500.

The race itself, with all its tradition and pageantry and passion, still retains its old magic.