The toll cost was worth every cent for Joe Davino.

A couple years ago, Davino was driving down the New Jersey Turnpike to the Standardbred Horse Sale in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

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“I had a friend there and I called him and asked where they were in the order,” Davino said. “I asked him if there was any that looked good and he said one at [hip] number 40 looked pretty good. I said all right, let’s go for him.

“I finally had to hang up because I was driving and I didn’t want to do two things at once, and I’m thinking ‘Oh man, how much is this gonna cost me?’”

By the time he arrived in Harrisburg, Davino was the proud owner of Take My Picture, who sold for $35,000. Take My Picture is the first horse the Clarksburg, New Jersey resident will bring to the Breeders Crown finals; he is in Saturday’s $500,000 Breeders Crown for three-year-old male trotters at Mohegan Sun at Pocono Downs.

“That toll was the best money I ever spent,” Davino said. “I tell that story to a lot of people, how I bought him on the turnpike.”

Davino, who runs six acres of greenhouses on his Central Jersey farm, co-owns the horse with wife Laurie. He got into the racing business a decade ago after being raised among horses in Monroe Township.

“I grew up on a farm, we always had some animals around,” he said. “I had horses since I was little.

“When my daughter Eliza was eight or nine, she started doing shows. A friend of mine, whose son played hockey with my son, had a few race horses. He said ‘You ought to get one that races.’ I bought a couple of babies and just kind of got hooked on it.”

Davino, who owns 17 horses, has had varying degrees of success since starting his ownership career in 2001. On Sept. 25, his three-year-old pacing filly Anndrovette won the $200,000 New York Sire Stakes championship at Yonkers Raceway.

Take My Picture has won two of 18 races and $280,257 this season. He won the $50,000 Townsend Ackerman on Aug. 6 at the Meadowlands and was second in the $100,000 New Jersey Sire Stakes at Freehold on Aug. 27.

“From day one, he’s just been a very, very nice animal,” Davino said. “We gelded him, and after that we’d be watching him go around the track and I didn’t see anything I didn’t like. All of a sudden we took him to a qualifier and he’s just gone from there.

“He’s a pleasure to be around. Just a very, very nice animal. You can ride him, you can jog him, you can put a saddle on him. He’s a very well tempered animal. I’ll never sell him; he’s got a home for life on my farm. I’ll probably give him a shot at the big races.”

Take My Picture was broken and trained earlier in his career by Taylor Gower. He currently is trained by Nick Drennan and was driven most recently by Andy Miller.

“It’s a horse race, man, anything can happen,” Davino said, who is hoping for a nice trip. “There are some very good animals in there. He’s a nice animal and he deserves to be there. I don’t want to jinx myself here, but I would love to have a nice check.”

(Hambletonian Society)