One final thought

You never want to begin a discourse by saying "back in the day." Especially if you're of a certain age.

Partly this is because it reveals to you to be, yes, of a certain age, and thus instantly discredits you for those who are not of a certain age. And partly it's because, by the very nature of "back in the day," back in the day is about as relevant to this day as aerodynamics are to an earthworm.

So of course the Blob is going to begin one last thought about the 104th Indianapolis 500 with, you guessed it, "back in the day."

Back in the day, the Indianapolis 500 began at 11 o'clock in the morning.

On Sunday, the green didn't drop until 2:30 p.m.

This made zero sense, especially when you consider there were no traffic snarls to wade through to get into the place. No fans meant no atmosphere, but it also meant no waiting. Yet everyone hung around until 2:30 to get the show on the road.

I'm sure it was a programming thing with NBC, and I get that. The day when the people running a sporting event dictated to the networks what time the event was going to start has been dirt-napping for a good long while now. It is, shall we say, way back in the day.

No, these days the network tail wags the sporting event dog, because the networks are the ones shoveling out the dough for the broadcast rights. You pays your money, you sets the rules.

And yet.

And yet, delaying the start until 2:30 meant the race didn't wrap until after 5:30 p.m., and it left no time for a red-flag restart after Spencer Pigot opened an auto-and-safety-parts store with five laps to run. IndyCar doesn't go in for those sorts of manufactured finishes anyway, but cleaning up Pigot's mess -- especially repairing the pit wall attenuator he atomized-- would have taken a good hour or more.

That puts the finish at 7 p.m. or after and then you're getting into evening programming, and no way was NBC going to stick with the race that long. Likely the big network would have bailed and shuffled the finish to one of its subsidiary entities. And that would not have gone over well with those tuning in, either.

Bottom line: Drop the flag at noon or slightly after, and you buy yourself more time in case what happened at the end happens. And maybe the 500 gets the ending it deserves in a year that desperately needed it.

 Not like you had to wait for the fans to arrive, after all.