LAS VEGAS -- Last year during Champion's Week, Denny Hamlin barreled head-long into the vaunted nightlife of Las Vegas with an appetite befitting his reputation as one of NASCAR's most eligible bachelors and legitimate party animals.

Not so this year. There are no pickup basketball games for Hamlin and his friends, some of whom happen to be celebrities. There is no lavish party set up to celebrate the driver's Sprint Cup season.

There is, it seems, only sadness -- seen clearly in Hamlin's eyes and by his own admission lingering in his head. Hamlin has increasingly taken on a hang-dog expression as a seemingly endless stream of functions continues to celebrate Jimmie Johnson's unprecedented fifth consecutive Cup title.

At every stop, Hamlin stares blankly after a while, wondering what might have been. At each turn the 12 Chase drivers took during Thursday's Victory Lap through glittery Vegas, Hamlin smelled the fumes of Johnson's No. 48 Chevrolet exhaust as it drove in front of him -- reminding him once again that he finished second in the final standings after becoming the first driver in the Chase era to squander a lead in the final race of the season.

Hamlin candidly admitted Thursday that he had a much better time in Vegas following the 2009 season, when he finished fifth in points, than he's having this year.

"Second, for sure, is worse than fifth," Hamlin said. "Second sucks in a lot of different ways -- especially when you come so close. It's painful, trust me."

As Johnson stacked up the hardware for several contingency awards at Thursday's Myers Brothers Luncheon at the swank Bellagio Hotel ballroom, Hamlin continued to stew. Even though Hamlin received some recognition, too, he was constantly reminded that Johnson was the Cup Series champion when it might have been him.

It has reduced Hamlin to counting the minutes until he can leave Las Vegas.

"Every award that he accepts, every time I think [I] should have been in that position, should have been in that position," Hamlin said. "And so for me, it just more has to do with thinking about the what-ifs.

"I feel like once I leave Vegas, I've got to worry about next year. And really, I have put it in my mind that I'm not thinking about next year until I get through this weekend. So after this weekend, I'm going to move on. I've just got two more days of it."

Johnson said he understands and there is a small part of him that has some compassion for Hamlin. But only a very small part.

"I've been there," said Johnson, who won the first of his five consecutive titles in 2006 after finishing second in points back-to-back in 2003 and 2004, and fifth in 2005. "I know the feelings -- and for myself, I wasn't in a hurry to get rid of them. It seems like he has that same mindset, because those feelings will motivate him all winter long, all spring, all summer. And he will show up and be a smarter driver, a better driver, and even more of a threat next year.

"So I've been there and know what he's going through. It's tough to put on a face day after day after day, especially with how many events we have and how close he was to getting that championship. I understand, but as a competitor you don't really put a lot of feelings into it like, 'Aw, man, I feel bad for you, buddy.' I'm thinking more about next year and how much stronger he's going to be, rather than feeling sorry for him."

Hamlin seems determined to put this season behind him, too, and said he was anxious to return to North Carolina to meet with crew chief Mike Ford and other team officials at the Joe Gibbs Racing shop in Huntersville, N.C. He said he and Ford, who sometimes have had a tumultuous relationship, have not spoken since the season-ending race at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Nov. 21.

They plan to do so -- and begin preparing for the 2011 season -- during a meeting next Monday at the JGR shop.

"It's not his fault that we didn't win the championship, and I don't feel like I lost us the championship," Hamlin said. "We lost as a team -- but it wasn't for a lack of effort. We gave it our all. It was just circumstances that just didn't work in our favor that did work in the other team's favor."

Among those circumstances was a call by Ford for a late green-flag pit stop for fuel in a race at Phoenix that Hamlin had dominated. Johnson was among those who stayed out and, having been instructed much earlier by crew chief Chad Knaus to save fuel, was able to stretch it to the end and cut the points lead by Hamlin from 36 at the start of the race to 15 by the time it was finished.

Hamlin admitted Thursday that it was then that his envisioned championship began to be lost to Johnson.

"Luckily, our fuel mileage hadn't been an issue for the entire Chase," Hamlin said. "It really just never came into play until Phoenix. Going into Phoenix, we were like, 'OK, we're going into Jimmie's race track. This is where we're going to make or break our championship.' And I knew it before the race even started. I knew the championship was going to run through Phoenix.

"When we got out there and jumped out to the lead, I was like, 'This is it!' I can't express the emotion that I was feeling inside the car, where I was like, 'We're about to make something happen here that hadn't been done in a while.' But then when it all gets crushed in the end ... I didn't feel defeated when I got to Homestead, but I felt so deflated."

That feeling only worsened after a poor Friday practice and a poor performance during qualifying that led to Hamlin starting 37th in the race. Johnson started fifth.

"There was only one race to get it back -- and it was an all-or-nothing race," Hamlin said. "We had a lot of confidence going in. I really did. And then Friday comes around and we qualified so bad. Even though we had been in that position before and won the race the year before from that same spot, it just did not feel the same. It just did not feel like it did the year before.

"So I was a little bit worried, but I thought we would be competitive. They dropped the green flag and I said to myself, 'This is it. We've got it. We're moving forward.' And then in one corner, things all changed."

It changed because Hamlin, while attempting to make an aggressive move in a charge to advance toward the front, clipped the No. 16 car of Greg Biffle and sent himself spinning off into the infield. Hamlin's car was never quite the same afterward, even though it wasn't until he got caught on pit road during a caution and went a lap down much later that his chances finally were cooked.

"The mental side of it, I feel like I was pretty good. I really never let the pressure get to me at any point. I was completely calm up until probably driver intros of Homestead," Hamlin insisted.

"It didn't affect the way I drove at Homestead. It was just circumstances. All those things, the bad qualifying, it eventually catches up to you. You're going to get into those wrecks if you start in the back enough, and unfortunately in the final race it cost us."

He said he understands the age-old cliché that oftentimes you have to lose a championship before you can win one. He believes he will learn from letting this year's title slip through his gloved fingers -- adding that he soon will be hard at work trying to improve his qualifying and restart efforts for next season. He also said he learned the hard way that he needs to be more aggressive in the beginning stages of the Chase, insisting that if he had been this year he very well could have had the championship wrapped up even before Homestead.

Johnson has heard it all before; heck, he's even lived it. So does he subscribe to the theory that you need to lose a championship or two before you truly learn how to win one?

"I absolutely hate that theory," Johnson admitted. "When people would tell me that as a consolation prize when I lost in '04 and '05, I was like, 'Hell with that, I hate that philosophy.' And even when I then won in '06, I was like, 'Yeah, well, I won my championship -- but it could have been three!'

"There is something to it. We've seen it in all forms of sports. It seems like it applies to race wins, too. It seems like guys have to throw one or two away before they get one, in most cases. And in championships it obviously happens in more cases than not, so that means there is something to it. That doesn't mean I have to like it."

Hamlin doesn't have to like it, either. But he does now have to live it -- just as Johnson once did. He still won a series-high eight races in 2010 while finishing a career-best in points. He just wonders openly if he can duplicate the magic next season to put him in position to challenge for the championship again, knowing it is not a given.

"That's the thing. You put on paper each year what you want to accomplish. And everything we wanted had been checked off -- except for one," Hamlin said. "You just don't have years of being competitive like we had this year that often. I hope it comes in the future every single year, but it's going to be hard to repeat what happened this year. The only thing I can think of is that I'm leading less laps but winning more races; that tells me we're getting better as a team.

"So that's encouraging for me, knowing we're able to close and win races. Hopefully now we're going to go from knowing how to close and win races to knowing how to close and win championships. Obviously those are two different things."