(This appeared in Newsday’s Act2 section)

I am not a king, so I cannot claim horse racing is my sport. Nevertheless, on rare occasions I take myself to the track for an afternoon of hoping to channel Nostradamus — without the unreasonable expectation of leaving the place a hundredaire. (At the very best.)

The potential entertainment, alongside timid $2 wagers on a handful of races, includes the occasional surge of adrenaline as the steeds charge down the homestretch but mostly consists of idle chatter with a friend. Because cashing a bet really is nothing more than a magnificent coincidence.

An old horseplayer’s joke goes something like this: I bet on a nag at 10-to-1. He didn’t come in until quarter past two.

On a recent venture to play the ponies—though it always feels like they are playing me—I joined former Newsday racing writer Ed McNamara, who has been to 116 tracks on four continents and fully understands the handicapping truths. Among those: Pursuing winners is a Captain Ahab kind of thing. There is no appeals court when you fail. You need not be in the desert to encounter a mirage.

Anyway, we patronized Aqueduct Racetrack, which is in Ozone Park adjacent to that parking lot known as the Belt Parkway. Not because the relatively shabby, vaguely ghostlike Aqueduct was a first choice, but because of a temporary construction-related closure at Belmont Park, the far more pleasantly rustic layout on the Queens-Nassau line.

Weirdly, the New York Racing Association had labeled its fall meeting “Belmont Park at the Big A,” a geographical misnomer something like marketing the local NFL team as “the New York Giants of East Rutherford, New Jersey.”

The Aqueduct crowd, actually just a sparse assembly, was overwhelmingly male, of the older variety, several chewing on unlit cigars, mostly positioning themselves in the immediate vicinity of the lobby’s betting terminals. Outside, on a lovely, clear autumn day, while jets lazily ascended from nearby Kennedy Airport, the seats were virtually empty.

The day’s adventure began by purchasing a $20 voucher at an impersonal touch-screen terminal, since there was no evidence of the betting windows where human beings used to take one’s cash. Simple enough, but just two races into my attempts at clairvoyance, I failed to retrieve my voucher with its remaining worth of $16.

At that point, I had lost one $2 gamble, then won $6.40 off a second $2 try, which briefly had me feeling like Jesse James. Until I realized, too late, that the aforementioned $16 was gone without the fun of investing it in further efforts to pin the tail on a donkey.

So, I bought another $10 voucher.

I had approached the day’s challenge scientifically, arriving with my wife’s choices culled from morning entry lists and based, she said, on those horses’ names that best telegraphed “attitude”: Arrogant Lady, Arctic Arrogance, Alpine Queen and Shortsinthewinter.

My own criterion was the highly sophisticated technique of playing hunches. Java Buzz in the second race (he was my one winner, a figurative caffeine jolt that quickly dissipated), Prairie Fire in the fourth, Wanna Winna in the fifth, Fouette in the sixth. Should I have considered the horses’ past performances? Interpreted their post positions as lucky numbers? Maybe zeroed in on those being ridden by prominent jockeys?

“It’s a horse race,” Ed counseled. “Not a jockey race.”

The day’s consequences: Arrogant Lady led until the final 200 yards but finished second. Arctic Arrogance led until the final 150 yards but faded to second. Alpine Queen came in fourth. Prairie Fire flamed out, stumbling from the gate and immediately giving up the chase. Wanna Winna was no winna; sixth. Fouette lumbered home fourth. Shortsinthewinter, who went off at 57-to-1 odds, would have paid $114 if he had won. Alas, he was eighth, frozen out in a field of 10.

You see the pattern. The whole exercise was something like climbing Mount Everest without Sherpa guides, hand holds or ropes. Ed and I, our good visit done, quit before the last couple of races, playing the odds of beating the traffic home on the Belt. Lost that one, too.