Taking a chance on love--and horses.

Ten years ago, or maybe 11 or 12, a black Labrador retriever ran loose along the rail of a thoroughbred race track in Kentucky. There began a romance, for the Lab scampered up to a woman shooting pictures of horses working out, and behind the Lab came a man, a horse trainer looking for his dog.

"Blinkers, come here," said the trainer, and the photographer said, "I got him." Soon enough, in the happy way life sometimes works, Kenny McPeek and Susan Lustig began the journey that led them to Barn 10 at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May, 2002.

It's 5:17 p.m. and the soft silence of the track's backside is ended by an announcement amplified by a loudspeaker mounted above Barn 10: "RACE NINE, THE DERBY, TO THE PADDOCK." It's time for the horses to do what they're born to do. Time to run. Time to make a dream real.

Such magic, the Kentucky Derby. We're there at the barn, witnesses, a hundred people gathered in the soft sunlight of May in Kentucky. At 5:21 an outrider calls out, "Don't take too much longer, we've got to get over there." Eighteen 3-year-old thoroughbreds are to walk the walk from the backside barns, a half-mile to the paddock, walking toward the distant electric murmur rising from tens of thousands of spectators.

Such a sight, the grand old place, Churchill Downs. It's a wooden treasure in a time of steel, the twin spires majestic. And there breathes no animal more beautiful than a horse in motion. Toward those spires the 18 horses walk as if on air. It's 5:28 and a woman in the bleachers, her hat a bouquet of roses, calls out, "It's going to be a happy Holiday." The McPeeks come to this magic day with Harlan's Holiday, a chestnut colt, winner of its last two races, the favorite in this Kentucky Derby.

"We can't hold him down," the trainer had said midweek. "He's been jumping around in the shed row. He's like the guy who gets up with a smile because he knows he's going to work. Gets his lunch pail, does the job, comes home. Gets a good night's rest, gets up in the morning and does it again."

Such a story, the McPeeks. Outside Barn 10 one morning, Sue McPeek carried on her shoulders her daughter, Jenna, a year and a half old.