wonderful world of

Disney. There will be no lifting orchestra music, no gallop into

a sky-blue horizon, no big audience ovation as the story ends and the credits roll.

Barbaro's tale ends sadly.

Maybe not tragically, because as many have pointed out, this was an animal after all, and there are so many other things going on out there that constitute tragedy before this does.

Can we settle on a tear-jerker then? Can we empathize with the people who cared so deeply for this horse over the last 8 months, who invited us into their world,

who wore their hearts on their rolled-up sleeves as they went about

the day-to-day, sometimes

hour-to-hour task of keeping this horse alive?

Because in the end, this was not a horse story. It was a people story. It was about Roy and Gretchen Jackson and it was about Dr. Dean Richardson, the optimistic vet who tried all sorts of remedies to correct

Barbaro's mounting physical

ailments, and who made the

courageous call, along with the Jacksons, to end the horse's life yesterday morning rather than putting it through any prolonged pain.

In the end it was about us, too. Anyone who got drawn into the story, anyone who stopped what they were doing and felt a winter-chill sadness when they heard the news yesterday. For some, Barbaro was the racehorse that embodied and exemplified what that sport is about. Barbaro was our conduit into horse racing, a sport forever teetering on the thin line that separates sadness from euphoria, and high risk from high reward.

It is an odd mix of hot-blooded hearts and cold-hearted calculation, horse racing is. There are no in-betweens, just degrees on both ends. Richardson made that clear yesterday, clearer than any prognosis he ever

offered about the horse. He was asked if there was ever a time "or moment" when he "actually felt like [Barbaro] was going to make it through this?"

"Yeah," he said. "Because I'm human."

As we all are. Richardson

later was asked why he thought the world wrapped its arms around Barbaro. "I think he was loved because he was a great athlete," he said. "And

people love greatness."

It was the most off he has been in analyzing things over

the last 8 months. There have been plenty of horses who have captured our fancy over those spring months that constitute the Triple Crown season, great horses, but most have slipped from our collective conscious by fall.

We were sucked in as much by Barbaro's vulnerability as we were his majesty. We love animals for both these traits in

varying degrees, but ultimately what personalizes them for us is the former and not the latter. Horse-racing people will tell you every horse runs the risk of breaking down every time it

enters a gate, that it goes with the territory and is part of the sport, but to the rest of us, that only increases our sense of responsibility when it does occur, especially on such a grand stage.

There's no getting past it: This animal, so majestic in its prehistoric elegance, so fleet and fragile in its construction, died while entertaining us. Sure it could have occurred in a field somewhere with no eyes upon it,

but it didn't. It occurred with the world's eyes upon it, replayed countless times in countless

places.

We saw in the Jacksons a lot of ourselves, their perspective, even yesterday, mixed with equal parts emotion, their appreciation as genuine as our prayers. And we saw in Richardson's

panache the possibility of a

happy ending, extracting oodles of optimism from words intended only to offer the thinnest sliver of hope.

"I thought many times that same optimism," Richardson said. "Absolutely. But at the same time intellectually all these challenges were there throughout, and remained. So it would be hard to get up and go to work every day if I didn't think any of it was going to work."

My guess is that it will be hard for him to get up and go to work today, and maybe for a while.

My guess is that he will not be alone in that, that there are

plenty of people out there, present company included, who were hoping for a Disney ending to what was, and still is, a great human story. *

Send e-mail to

donnels@phillynews.com.

For recent columns, go to

http://go.philly.com/donnellon.