The 2015 Flat season was good, but it should have been golden.
Make no mistake, this was a curate's egg of a campaign which had the capacity to delight and dumbfound in equal measure.
Golden Horn, the horse that no-one wanted, was the pre-eminent driving force throughout the summer.
John Gosden's colt won a shed-load of top-drawer races, including the Derby and the Arc, and was campaigned fearlessly by his engaging owner Anthony Oppenheimer.
His sheen of invincibility was stained in the International at York, though, while the loose turf on that wet day in Kentucky ensured there was no glorious swansong at the Breeders' Cup meeting.
And then there was the unusual case of Gleneagles, the dual Guineas and Royal Ascot winner who then spent four cosy months in his box because the ground was not right for him.
When he did return to the fray during the autumn, it all felt a little contrived.
Aidan O'Brien's colt was not great in the QEII at Ascot, before a grand assault on the Breeders' Cup Classic backfired quite spectacularly on a surface which was, ironically, not right for him.
That was, sadly, also the case at Longchamp for Treve, the wonderful mare from Chantilly whose pursuit of an unprecedented third Arc success was impinged by brisk ground and perhaps unnecessarily delayed tactics from jockey Thierry Jarnet.
Silvestre de Sousa, by contrast, barely put a foot wrong all year as the boy from Brazil became a man again.
De Sousa soared, but once Richard Hughes called time on a distinguished career, the new all-signing, all-dancing jockeys' championship was, disappointingly, a one-horse walkover.
Ryan Moore could feasibly have played a hand in the finish, especially once he set a new post-war record for winners ridden at Royal Ascot, b ut, for once, he did not have it all his own way as a neck injury left the world's best in limbo for nearly three months.
For renaissance man Frankie Dettori, there were no such hold-ups.
Thanks in large part to Golden Horn and a very happy reunion with the peerless Gosden, his flying dismount once again became commonplace - and racing smiled with him.
Dettori's dark days must now feel like a wisp of black cloud against a blue horizon, yet, perhaps fittingly during this frayed-round-the-edges campaign, his year ended raggedly after he picked up a one-month ban for careless riding when second on Max Dynamite in the Melbourne Cup.
But that indiscretion was no more than a grainy footnote to an equine fable which went global as Michelle Payne became the first woman to win the race on Prince of Penzance.
Payne's heroism stopped a sporting world - never mind a nation - and also helped to stimulate important debate about the underlying, yet startlingly obvious, chauvinistic backdrop to horseracing.
American Pharoah similarly achieved something that had long been considered unreachable as the bay colt from Bob Baffert's stables became the first horse since 1978 to win the American Triple Crown.
His nomination by TIME magazine for 2015 Person of the Year was pushing things a little too far - that said, Kim Kardashian and Vladimir Putin also made the shortlist - but it was a revealing gesture about the regard in which he is held by an American public that is usually indifferent to racing.
Much closer to home, we will not forget what Muhaarar, Legatissimo and Solow did in a hurry, while the emergence of Simple Verse, the eventual St Leger winner, deserved more gravitas than was given at the time.
As always seems to be the case during the winter, O'Brien has seemingly cornered the early Classics after Ballydoyle tyros Air Force Blue and Minding looked ridiculously good in the autumn.
But if this year has reminded us of anything, it is racing's time-honoured refusal to follow any semblance of a script. I n truth, we wouldn't want it any other way.