At the start of the Belmont Stakes on Saturday, I expected to see Da’ Tara out front, but that was the last thing that unfolded according to plan. I did not expect to see him in front at the wire (and at the longest odds on the board, it’s a pari-mutuel certainty that I was not alone in that assumption).

I did not expect to see Big Brown shoved up into horses, bottle on the inside, and rank. I did not expect to see Kent Desormeaux asking him for his run and getting nothing. I did not expect to see Rick Dutrow, soaked in sweat, forlorn at the barn, refusing interviews.

But in retrospect, how else could this have ended? This Triple Crown season has been the most trying of my career as a turf correspondent. It was a rocky road from roses to carnations, and it brought out the worst in many people.

In a sense, I am pleased that this was the outcome, because now I am not saddled with the difficult task of defending the horse’s victory against a braying cadre of sentimental naysayers with rose-tinted rewrites of history and unexamined prejudices.

I would have had to confront the issue of Winstrol: Did the systematic use of steroids in Rick Dutrow’s big horse put an asterisk beside his victories?

The answer is simple: It’s not cheating if it’s not against the rules. There may come a day when we decide that football players must be able to overcome the muscle aches they face as a natural consequence of their sport without, say, aspirin. But until we write that rule, aspirin is not against the rules. Neither are any number of drugs, balms, or techniques. To claim that the use of steroids is an infraction in a game in which it is not forbidden is akin to putting forth the idea that volleyball players need to stop using their hands because soccer players are not allowed to handle the ball, or that tackling in football is a foul because that’s the way basketball is played.

No doubt, this will be met with heated demands that we look back into the past to the glory days of racing.

At the Jockey Club’s annual Round Table Conference, Alan Foreman, Chairman & CEO of the Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association, said:

“For more than 50 years, our industry has struggled with attempts to achieve uniformity, most notably in the area of medication use and drug testing.”

An industry does not struggle for 50 years because those years are a golden age of racing in which no drugs are administered to horses.

Rep. Ed Whitfield of Kentucky wrote in the Thoroughbred Times that England had outlawed steroids 50 years ago, and that 27 years ago “Congress spearheaded efforts to enact legislation that would have banned a number of drugs from horse racing.”

Twenty-seven years ago.

It’s a basic rule of studying history that laws are not made to regulate non-issues.

This is not to say that our horses should be drugged. But it must be said that what we are looking at is not a record book filled with pure victories recently tarnished by a new wave of hopped-up horses. As I noted in Friday’s paper, the recent discovery of the training journal of a wonderful 1930s Australian racehorse named Phar Lap showed that he was given belladonna, strychnine, arsenic, and cocaine. An Australian veterinarian, Dr. Percy Sykes, told ABC news in a story about Phar Lap’s death that “in those days, arsenic was quite a common tonic, usually given in the form of a solution. It was so common that I’d reckon 90 per cent of the horses had arsenic in their system.”

This will be met with grousing that back in the old days there were big, wonderful horse farms. The sport was pure; the horses were homebred. We didn’t have to deal with such nefarious money men as Michael Iavarone and IEAH Stables.

It is simple to point out that the second initial in C. V. Whitney’s name — whose marvelous farm is so often cited as the best example of the way things were — was Vanderbilt. The fortune that built that stable came from a robber baron. Not a figurative Wall Street robber baron, an actual one.

Hearing folks decry the presence of new interests in horses, driven by interests that are too pecuniary, sounds an awful lot like hearing people say that the schools used to be good around here, but nowadays they let anyone in, and you just don’t know who is going to be sitting next to Johnny when the bell rings. It’s creepy at best.

There is no reason we should not move forward; there is no reason not to investigate the use of steroids. But there is no reason to imagine that horse racing is sport recently sullied by bad practices and rough characters.

Nor is there any reason to detract from the victories put in the books by Big Brown. It was a heck of a run.

It was heartbreak to see Desormeaux end the race early and pull Big Brown up. But what could he do? This has been a strange and terrible five weeks, our moments of glory punctuated by moments of disaster. Desormeaux knew the spotlight was on them, knew the world was holding its breath.

mwatman@nysun.com