THIS time, they couldn’t summon the energy to boo, or to jeer, or to do anything other than swallow their voices along with their disappointment. This is the sound of silence, the hum of heartbreak. A few strides from the finish line, if you listened close enough, this is what you heard, simultaneously, out of 120,139 voice boxes cramming the Belmont Park grandstand:

“Oh, no . . . ”

And a few seconds later, this is what you heard: nothing. Silence. Emptiness. Out of an afternoon of celebration, a day when it seemed everyone was wearing a Smarty Jones shirt, waving a Smarty Jones placard, filling the grounds in and around Belmont Park with Smarty Jones revelry, there was suddenly nothing but the aching quiet of another Triple Crown bid reduced to dust by the cruelest 12 furlongs in horse racing.

“I thought we were in good shape,” said Stewart Elliott, the jockey whose battles and emotional bruises had helped add an extra few gallons of fuel to this wonderful tale these past six weeks. “And then, as the end got closer, I saw the other horse. And that’s when I thought we might have some trouble.”

That’s when everything imploded, right there on the home stretch of the 136th Belmont Stakes, right as the field came perfectly into view for the people who’d jammed the grandstand, expecting to be witnesses to history. Before they made the turn, Smarty Jones led the race, and the track announcer, speaking on behalf of just about everyone, yelped: “Smarty Jones has to keep the lead one more minute to win the Triple Crown!”

But there was a second horse plainly visible, too, unwilling to let Smarty Jones play the part of Secretariat, forbidding him from running off and hiding. The horse was named Birdstone, the jockey was named Edgar Prado, and neither were going anywhere. The crowd tried to push Smarty Jones home by the sheer volume of their plea; for a time it seemed to work, at least to the untrained eyes in the audience. But not everyone was fooled.

“He never settled,” said John Servis, the trainer who’d gone from nobody to rock star in less than a month. “I saw that and I thought we might be in trouble.”

None of this had seemed possible four hours earlier, as Smarty Jones woke from a pleasing slumber, as he greeted the most important day of his life with an eagerness that was evident to everyone inside Barn No. 5, anyone who could see Smarty Jones waiting for the race in Stall No. 10, even if there was a black cat that patrolled the area around the barn all afternoon.

“He’s like baby bear soup,” one of the other horse’s grooms marveled, as he fetched his own horse some cold water. “He looks just right.”

He looked just fine to the mass of humanity that greeted him as he made his way from the paddock to the track, as the people waved their signs. The roar rose high as the horse galloped around the track, as Ronan Tynan, the Irish tenor who’s brought so much luck to the Yankees, tried to do the same with a rendition of “New York, New York.”

Everything was set up perfectly.

And then the race happened. For a good long while, there were 120,139 people who finally seemed to believe they were going to see exactly what they’d come here to see, for at a mile and a quarter, Smarty Jones still had the lead.

But the Belmont Stakes is a mile and a half.

Six horses in the last eight years have learned how much of a difference that makes; Smarty Jones is the latest. Birdstone blitzed past, and Elliott tried to coach a miracle out of his horse’s legs, but everyone could see there would be no miracles on this day. There would be no Triple Crown. Their eyes told them that. Their silence alerted the world.