In March, not long after Yankee Jason Giambi, whose steroid use was made public in a December 2004 leak of grand jury testimony from the case against suspected steroid lab BALCO, issued a heartfelt apology to fans, teammates and the rest of the world without mentioning what it was he was apologizing for (it was his steroid use -- Shhhh!), a group of current and former players, including Canseco, appeared before a congressional committee that was grandstanding about steroids.

At the hearing, McGwire, the retired, Bunyonesque slugger who had done a lot to help baseball recover from a devastating strike by breaking Roger Maris' single-season home run record in 1998, refused to answer questions about whether he'd used steroids. "I'm not here to talk about the past," he kept repeating.

In a matter of minutes, McGwire's reputation as an American hero was destroyed. A few months later, McGwire, who'd worn a Cardinals uniform when he broke Maris' record, was booed in St. Louis. No former Cardinals get booed in St. Louis. That fans there booed McGwire, who a few years earlier had had a section of interstate highway in town renamed for him, showed how badly he'd crashed.

But among the men sitting shoulder to shoulder in that congressional hearing room on that March day, McGwire got off easy compared to Rafael Palmeiro. The Baltimore Orioles star pointed his finger at the committee and said, "I have never used steroids. Period." On Aug. 1, baseball announced that Palmeiro had tested positive for steroids.

He was suspended for 10 days like the others, but he was no Alex Sanchez. Earlier in the year -- after his positive test but before his appeals were exhausted and the results announced, timing that some found fishy -- Palmeiro had reached the 3,000-hit mark, which combined with his 500 home runs all but assured him of a spot in the Hall of Fame.

Now that enshrinement appears unlikely. Booed at home and on the road, Palmeiro was eventually sent home for the rest of the season by the Orioles, ostensibly to nurse a sore leg.

In September, Major League Baseball and the players union were again renegotiating the steroid testing plan, in hopes of avoiding threatened congressional imposition of a tougher standard. While this was going on, Barry Bonds returned from a knee injury that had sidelined him for the entire season.

Bonds had been a key figure in the BALCO case. He was a client of the lab and one of the defendants had been his personal trainer. His steroid use also came out in the leaked testimony, though he'd denied knowingly using. Now, 41 years old and with the sports world waiting for him to prove his doubters right, to show that he couldn't do anything without steroids, he hit five home runs in 14 games, leaving him six shy of Babe Ruth's career total.

Did that performance mean his astonishing hitting prowess of this century hadn't been steroid fueled after all? Or merely that whatever he was juicing with wasn't detectable by the current tests?

Or maybe he was just in that same period Palmeiro had been in when he'd hit his 500th home run, the time before his first positive test. The reality of the year of the steroid, of the whole steroid era, is that we just don't know.

In November, the players and owners agreed on yet another, stiffer testing program, with a 50-game suspension for a first offense and a possible lifetime ban for a third. Congress backed off. Law and order had won the day.

In the meantime, getting back to the lunch pail side of our thesis, the Chicago White Sox won the World Series. This scrappy, superstar-free bunch -- Paul Konerko hardly transcends the sport in Derek Jeter- or Johnny Damon-like fashion -- brought the hard-working, blue-collar South Side its first championship since 1917.

And the Sox did so by beating the Houston Astros, who'd beaten the more glamorous Cardinals and Atlanta Braves to win the National League. The Braves, in turn, won the National League East only after the surprising, underdog Washington Nationals had spent much of the summer in first place. It was a stylish way for baseball to make its return to the capital, where it had been missing for 33 seasons.

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