INDIANAPOLIS – On a different day, perhaps, that would have been him out there, beating the other guy off the corner.

On a different day, he’d be the one – 50-year-old pixie, eternal bridesmaid, reformed pessimist – who’d drop the hammer on the pass and watch the checkers greet him at the finish and taste the grit of the bricks on his lips.

On a different day, a better, fairer, luckier da–

I’m sorry. I missed that.

“That’s not the way to approach me,” Mark Martin says.

Come again?

“You can say what you want, but I’ve had some days this year,” he goes on. “It’s been my day this year, all year. I’d love to have won the race. But I’m very grateful to have had a chance at it.”

So no tea and no sympathy for America’s favorite old guy not named Tom Watson, and no inferring bitterness from the way the fates keep passing him over. Yes, he’s the greatest driver in NASCAR history never to have won a points title or either of its signature events, Daytona and the Brickyard. Yes, he’s come so close in all three it would make a therapist rich if Martin were the sort of man who went in for therapists.

Second in the Brickyard on Sunday? Second again? Second forever, or so it seems?

“It’s better than 42nd, man,” Martin says.

Well, yes. There is that.

There is also this from Jimmie Johnson, who beat his Hendrick Motorsports teammates on the last restart with 24 laps to run and won the Brickyard for the second straight year: “The way he is, it’s contagious. It brings the best out of all of us on the race team. We look at Mark, and the guy is nonstop …

“I think he’s almost happy, too. Scary, right?”

Sure it is, because for a long time Martin was a man who always seemed to have one ear tuned to the sound of the other shoe dropping. It almost always did, after all. It did again Sunday.

The man won the pole at 50 and ran second all day as Juan Pablo Montoya ran away, and when Montoya made the mistake that opened the door – a pit penalty with 25 laps to run – he seemed poised to step through. But like his doppelganger Watson at the British Open, one moment did him in. Having defined the entire weekend along with Montoya, he lost the drag race on the restart to Johnson, and that ended it.

At Indy, passes for the lead don’t happen, especially in the closing laps. You can get close, and Martin did. You can make a run, and Martin did that, too, drawing briefly alongside Johnson off turn two with fewer than five laps left. But he was better than Johnson only there (“I was beating Jimmie pretty bad off turn two, but he was beating me pretty bad off of four,” he said later), and, anyway, the man out front in clean air simply holds all the cards at this place …

So: Jimmie Johnson wins again.

In a different part of his life, Martin would have gone all hangdog and said he saw it coming. In this springtime of his autumn, however, he figures even if it was coming, what was so bad about it?

“I was driving as fast as I could without wrecking,” he said when it was done. “I wasn’t sure I wasn’t gonna wreck anyway. I did everything I could.

“I’m actually just grateful that I had a chance to race for the win. I got beat. I didn’t get her done. But I gave my heart.”

And how could that not be enough?