Shanghai Bobby and Rosie Napravnik before the Hopeful

The 144th Saratoga season ended with a nice touch - symmetry at the Spa - jockey Rosie Napravnik driving to the finish line with Golden Tornado. A closer winning the final race of the season ridden by the woman who rode the winner of the first race on opening day.

The script writer deserves a bonus for that one.

And another Saratoga season, all 417 races, is complete and part of the vast history of racing at the Spa. The weather was warm and dry Monday, just like it's been since the middle of August. The closing day crowd of 21,272 was a 31 percent increase over the final day of 2011. The on-track handle was $3,499,623, up 39 percent, and the total handle was $17,949,500, up 24 percent.

Make no mistake about it: Saratoga remains a very popular racing meet and is a significant part of the Capital Region's economy.

• Continuing the trend of the final week, only four of the 11 races were won by favorites Monday. The final figures for favorites winning at the meet: 160 of 417, 38.4 percent.


• Trainer Linda Rice closed out what was a fairly quiet meet for her with a pair of victories to finish with eight. Rice won the fourth with We Need V L T's ($13.60) and the finale with Golden Tornado ($15.80).


• Ramon Dominguez added two more wins to a great season and ended with a meet-leading 68, a mere 17 ahead of Javier Castellano, who finished as the runner-up for the third straight year.


• Todd Pletcher beat Chad Brown by a comfortable seven wins to clinch his ninth training title. Each of them had a victory on Monday. They were in another league this summer with 36 and 29 wins, respectively. Steve Asmussen finished third with 12.