CONCORD, N.C. — Another Indy 500 has come and gone and I am convinced THE RACE is back to the all-caps version I lived as a kid.

That is, THE RACE means the Indy 500, not any other (lowercase) race, for now and for all time.

For most of my life, that event has been among the brightest of lights for me. It was on par with Christmas, my birthday and basketball state championships (I am a Hoosier, by the grace of God).

Amid the past troubles with the formation of CART, the subsequent outing of USAC, the formation of the IRL, which morphed into IndyCar, there were some lean years for the 500, which resulted in the de-capitalization of the word race.

No longer.

It’s as if I blinked and the 500-Mile Race reappeared, in all its glory and portent, the same way it had been when I started attending during the 1970s.

Now, Indy 500 purists (and I count myself one) have differing opinions of the event. Some like it, some tolerate it and some outright despise it, for his or her own reasons. I never despised it, regardless of some ham-handedness from certain parties, but there were a few years when the interest factor waned a bit.

I always paid attention and always watched the race, usually from Charlotte Motor Speedway, seeing as how I worked in NASCAR at the time.

The past five or so races? They were for sure and certain the pure quill.

This year’s race was gold, too. Simon Pagenaud owned the month, but Alexander Rossi’s ride amid the Red Mist was the stuff of legends, harking back to stirring drives by guys such as A.J. Foyt, Rick Mears, Gordon Johncock and Mario Andretti. He fell a few feet short, but the show was one for the ages.

Pagenaud became the first French driver to win since Calvin Coolidge was in the White House (1920, to be exact) and he did it with a gritty drive of his own. He was on a mission, too, leading more than half the race to earn his likeness on the Borg-Warner Trophy.

The racing was better too, these past four or five years, than at any time since the heyday of the 1970s and 1980s. At no time was any driver just a mortal lock to cross the finish line three-quarters of a lap ahead of the runner-up. The formula seems to be working in terms of competition and the new cars look damned smart.

I love the fact that the drivers, from the oldest driver in the field down to the kids just out of high school, can point these missiles where they need to go and generally don’t cause the kinds of stupid wrecks we’ve seen in years past.

The pageantry was spectacular as always and I thought NBC did justice to the pomp and ceremony the way ABC had done for many years. The flyover was by-God wonderful, too, though I wonder how the F-15 was able to hang low and slow with the other planes.

Feelings are fleeting at times and difficult to describe at others. There’s an essence about Indy for me that had been, if not missing, then not nearly as evident as it was for the past 40 years. That essence was in full bloom and glory this year and it was a wondrous feeling.

I’ve often said the Indy 500 is the race of all races, the Boss Daddy of all motorized contests the world over. It was when I was a kid, it was when I was a young man and it has returned to its unquestioned position atop the motorsports mountain.

Sure, there aren’t any more Unsers, Foyts or Rutherfords in the field and Tony Hulman has been gone since 1977. Most of the people I knew from my earliest days at the speedway are either gone or no longer involved, and it was the people who made it great.

But this past May, at The Greatest Spectacle in Racing, I could feel them all watching and smiling and clapping and shaking their heads at the race that was put on that day.

The all-caps version of THE RACE was back, and it appears that it will remain in all caps for the foreseeable future.