Bubba

 It was Brickyard 400 weekend in Indy Saturday and Sunday, and damned if I forgot about it until the weekend was upon us. This either speaks volumes about my old-man brain, or about the Brickyard's diminished status in the motorsports firmament.

A bit of both, I'm thinking.

Oh, NASCAR still hypes the Brickyard as one of its official Crown Jewels, but that feels  like hollow courtesy these days. Sunday, a half-empty IMS spoke louder. In front of all those closed-off grandstands and here-and-there clumps of breathing humans, it felt like just another stock car race.

Until Bubba Wallace happened.

The man in the livery of Michael Jordan's race team had won a handful of Cup races, but he'd never won anything like the Brickyard 400. Yet there he was at the front of the field as the laps peeled away Sunday, trying to hold off onrushing defending champion Kyle Larson and stretch his last tank of gas to the finish at the same time.

And then ...

And then it rained. With six laps to go.

The red flag came out two laps later, and there we were, four laps to run and the field sitting in line in the pits for 18 minutes that must felt to Wallace like 18 centuries. The track was dried, the field ran the remaining four laps under yellow while Wallace's gas gauge trembled, and it was on to one of those damnable green-white-checker finishes.

(Why four laps under yellow before dropping the green, you ask? I don't know. Made zero sense to me, but I wasn't trying to manufacture a green-white-checker finish like NASCAR so clearly seemed to be doing. They're big into that sort of manipulation, it seems.)

Anyway, the green dropped, Wallace sailed away and, sure, of course, two numbskulls ran into each other behind him, bringing on a second green-white-checker. By this time it felt as if the racing gods had it in for him: Think you're gonna win, Bubba? Ha! We'll make it rain, then we'll make a couple of numbskulls run into each other, and, oh, by the way, how's your fuel situation?

Which is where history itself stepped in with a reply: Just fine.

Just fine, because the green dropped again, Wallace fled again, and this time there was no catching him. A couple of laps later he was crossing the yard of brick under the checkered flag, and the Brickyard 400 had the sort of moment for which it had been starving for years.

Bubba Wallace,  Brickyard champion. Bubba Wallace, first black driver in 116 years to win a race of any kind at the most iconic site in motorsports.

It was yet another historic moment at a place that breathes history like air because it has seen so much of it, and whose sustaining cache is that almost no other motorsports venue has seen more. It's gone from Harroun and DePalma and Milton and Lockhart to Arnold and Meyer and Shaw and Rose; from Vukovich to Ward to Foyt to all those Andrettis and Unsers.

Gordon and Earnhardt and Jimmie Johnson? Yep, they're in there. Schumacher and Barrichello and Hakkinen, too. Castroneves, Franchitti, Dixon, Guthrie, Patrick ... on and on it goes.

And now, Bubba Wallace. Who adds his own unique piece to a seemingly unending tapestry.

Racing gods and forgetful old men be hanged.