Mike Celizic

Horseracing isn’t dead like the dinosaurs. It’s more like the black rhinoceros — something that someday will exist only in zoos as an exhibit, not in the real world as something alive and thriving and a part of the landscape.

But even when every surviving race track is converted into a slot-machine casino and racing is a subchapter in a history book on former American sports, the Kentucky Derby will still be one of the biggest shows in sports and the nation will drop what it’s doing on the first Saturday in May to watch the Run for the Roses.

There’s no rational reason why other than that the race is the “Fastest Two Minutes in Sports,” which brings it in right around the average American’s attention span. So you can spend Saturday doing Saturday things, then find a tube, watch the race, watch the replay if you’re a real glutton for horseracing, and be about your business.

Best of all, you don’t have to remember anything about the race other than the winner. And you have to remember that only as long as the winner is still going for the Triple Crown, which consists of the Derby and two other races you may or may not be able to name. Once the Triple Crown is out of play, no one will blame you if all you can remember about the race is what kind of beer you drank at the pre-race party.

Ah, the party. I had almost forgotten the party. I’m willing to bet that the real reason the Derby remains so enormously popular is a combination of a rich tradition, a spring running date and the parties that come along with it. And if I could get a $5-million government grant, I’m sure I could prove it.

The first big outdoor event of spring is the Masters, and it has a lot of the elements of the Derby: greenery and flowers, parties and history. The last big event of spring is the Indy 500, which has the parties and the history, but eschews the posies.

The Derby snags more casual viewers than any of them. That’s because watching even just the final round of the Masters involves an investment of five or six hours, and it does no good to have no idea who’s playing. You have to know something about the game and the players to get sucked into it.

Indy isn’t a lot different. It’s hours of watching flying billboards zip around an oval. Maybe if Danica Patrick were in the lead, you’d hang around to see how it comes out. But if you’re a non-fan and Helio Castroneves is leading, you’re not going to watch.

The Derby, like the Super Bowl, requires no prior knowledge. You come for the party and you watch the action because that’s what your parents did and their parents did and you do. It’s like dying eggs at Easter. Few of us know why we do I or what it has to do with a religious holiday, but we do it because we’ve always done it.

The other thing about the Derby that vastly expands its audience is that it has things that everyone can relate to. For sports fans, there’s the athlete jockeys and the athlete horses and the banging and jostling and the threat of catastrophe. Plus, you can get up a blind pool where everybody throws in a few bucks and you hold a blind draw for the horses.

For the non-fan, there’s a magic drink — the mint julep — and fancy clothes and things to eat that Martha Stewart showed you how to make. It doesn’t matter that the mint julep isn’t much of a drink. It sounds exotic and it’s special to the race — like Wimbledon and Pimm’s Cup.

The fancy hats and all those gorgeous horses alone will suck in women viewers who ordinarily would sooner spend a week in line at a motor vehicle agency than watch a sporting event. The chance to sip an exotic drink and eat things made with arugula seals the deal.

So what if the only horses anyone can name are Secretariat and Barbaro, the first because he was so great and the second because he was so tragic. The announcers will tell which horses to watch and it’s over in two minutes anyway.

Finally, the Derby is a rite of spring. It’s held halfway through the season, and more often than not, the weather is simply gorgeous on a late Saturday afternoon. The Masters may be the first spring event, but to folks in the frozen northlands, the Derby is the first spring event that actually takes place in spring-like weather. If they held it the first Saturday in March, it would have died 100 years ago.

It began in 1875, 28 years before the first World Series. We’ve been paying attention to it for 139 years. For most of those years, horseracing was the sport of kings, a vastly popular sport that merited its own section in the sports pages.

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It’s not that way any longer and never will be again. The sport still has the Breeder’s Cup, which is a big deal to true fans but not to casual fans. And the Preakness and Belmont get viewers in proportion to how much the Derby winner has been built up and what the chances are of a horse winning all three races.

But the Derby will last forever, getting ever stronger even as the sport it celebrates declines. It’s spring, it’s big hats, it’s alcohol, it’s finger food, it’s betting pools. It’s a party around an event that takes just two minutes of your attention.

That’s something America will never tire of.

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