"Everyone has heard of the Melbourne Cup" - even The Golden Bear.

Play a round of golf at Augusta! Sure that’s impressive.

Play a round of golf at Augusta with Jack Nicklaus, who “mastered” it six times and still ceremonially starts them off annually. Well yes, that raises the bar, nearly topweight in the “hard to beat stakes.”

But sit in a restaurant on the rugged cliffs of the Isle Of Capri in the Bay of Naples, enjoying a holiday lunch when Jack, wife Barbara walk in and Jack fawns on taking you to his entourage and the opening gambit goes along the lines: “I want to introduce you to my good friend from Australia, he won the Melbourne Cup.”

Jack might not have known much about racing, but he knew about The Cup.

The Cup. Our Cup, yes yes - “the race that stops a nation”. All that. It popped up in 1861, well before Sweet Caroline was written, more so before a nation became a federation.

Another American, Mark Twain, had come to see what this fuss was about at the end of that century.

He had already penned fictional tales of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but in 1895 he wrote of The Cup: “Nowhere in my travels have I encountered a festival of the people that has such magnetic appeal to the whole nation. The Cup astonishes me.”

It must have astonished “The Golden Bear” too. (An aside - A horse named after him won a maiden at Doomben from 19 starts, an Irish equivalent was a five-time maiden.)

But here is Jack, and his good friend from Australia who won the Cup is Kevin Bamford, regaling the tale of how he and wife Colleen won it with Americain back in 2010 with their partner Gerry Ryan.

Colleen and Kevin Bamford with Gerry Ryan and American's 2010 Melbourne Cup

Kevin had bought the opportunity to play with Nicklaus at a Robert Allenby cancer charity day, and jetting into Georgia on private jets and walking 18 holes with the legend, gave him plenty of time to talk about The Cup, his Cup.

The Bamford's are back again this year, that’s another story, that’s the thing about the Cup, there is always a story. There’s is via Onesmoothoperator and how they got from there to Tuesday is something else.

But that’s The Cup, it is something else. But it always remains and is The Cup.

“How do you explain to an outsider that the Cup nods towards egalitarianism, that it's Shakespearean, a sage about horses and human condition, about dreamers and schemers,  well bred horses, and urchins with legs of steel, toffs and desperates and ordinary people who are encouraged to think they are part of it all,” as the mighty wordsmith Les Carylon once wrote.

Fashion and sensibility will defy weather forecasts. Some will come as glamorous as a magazine photoshoot, kids from Broadmeadows or Craigieburn could be seen as the Pope or in a gorilla suit on the wet spacious lawns amongst the roses.

Don’t let anyone tell you about its loss of relevance, or that the rich upstart The Everest has its measure.

Come Tuesday (or even now), company accountants may well be seeking counsel or therapy as to why their hugely successful corporate clients have pawned the kids to have a Cup runner that could barely raise a ripple in the market but can chug around and get back $100k if they don’t.

It’s The Cup, you’ve just got to be in it. This race doesn’t just pop up.  It may not even be our best race, but it is the race everyone, seemingly everywhere, wants a runner in, let alone a chance to dream of winning it. 

This year Willie Mullins jets in from a Knight’s Choice like upset in the Breeder’s Cup (with a horse who would have failed the Racing Victoria vets), to try and take his last real elusive dream with Absurde.

Which is sort of the label that the first American horse to run in The Cup, Parchment Party fits well. He qualified, on sloppy dirt at Belmont, but got a golden ticket and is here to chase the chocolates.

A German jockey with a Norse mythology like name - Thore Hammer-Hansen - comes in to Flatten The Curve so to speak riding that named horse that has been transformed by his new trainer Henk Grewe, from a French easybeat  to a winning machine on turf.

Keep going and there are more stories, the possible favorite Presage Nocturne means Nocturnal Omen (in French, is a grey on a likely grey day etc etc.

Ok, 21 of the 24 started their racing careers in the northern hemisphere, leaving only “mongrel bred” who was bought in an on-line sale - Half Yours as the only “true blue” Aussie in the race, Torranzino and Smokin’ Romans were born in New Zealand. 

No cries though for a cap on the fly in fly outs, or the one way ticketers. Who had even heard of Knight’s Choice from Queensland last year?

This is what the Cup is about.

And yet earlier this year, it seemed The Cup was facing real peril, when News Limited ran a headline that the cup had been dealt “a brutal blow.”

Brutal? What was it? Surely not a clickbait algorithm.

 “The Cup” was apparently at its cultural crossroads.”

What could it have been?

Well News had surveyed 54,000 Aussies on all topics like cost of living, electric vehicles, home ownership, love lives and going shoeless in supermarkets before it got to The Cup and dredged up the peril that only 48% liked it against 52% who didn’t  “with women and young people more likely to feel the race that stops a nation has had its day and is officially “dead”.

“A cigarette paper between people who believe the great Melbourne Cup is losing popularity to the point where “people don't care anymore” and those who view it as an important institution.”

Dead, don’t care, what followed the bait were resurrection facts, like more people watching, wagering and women as shining lights on the equality of the sport.

Somewhere peter V’Landys got a mention: “The Melbourne Cup is the Melbourne Cup – you could get two donkeys in it and people would still pay attention to it," he said.

"It's great for Australian racing to have an aspirational race like the Melbourne Cup.

"I think even the Melbourne Cup has had a resurgence from the young audience that we have been able to generate (via The Everest).”

But climbing the mountain to win The Cup, is some tough ascent. To do it once is difficult enough, to scale it again, the sort of thing that dreams are made of.

Kevin and Colleen Bamford have listed sherpas like Far Cry, who just beat the ambulance, Nickajack Cave, who didn’t even get there and was more of a nightmare, Kindergarten Kid, ditto and ended up in Tasmania.

Jardine’s Lookout, Jukebox Jury, Delphi have all carried the Bamford's hope, this year they were sitting comfortably with one that Colleen had bred, Revelare, won the golden ticket in the Archer before going pare shaped in the Bart Cummings and Caulfield Cup.

A freakish chance to buy into Onesmoothoperator surfaced and tomorrow they take their chance along with dreamers from around the world, syndicates of all stripes to try and raise that Cup, that changes all lives for those involved.

“It just does, there is nothing like it,” said Colleen, a Fitzroy girl, SP bookies in the family, who turned first to the trots, has driven winners at the Meadowlands in the US but vividly remembers taking her Cup to see harness legend Gordon Rothacker in hospital.

“He died a few days later but it was amazing. In the oncology ward where people were getting their chemo treatments, nurses, doctors all wanted their photos with it, then they’d rung around family and friends who all came in to see it, touch it, the effect of the Cup, something I remember to this day."

Dead? Irrelevant? Don’t take that bait.