When I first heard the news that Alex Rodriguez used steroids, there was nothing but shock. The report triggered a San Andreas fault-line straight through my aorta; it created a blow to the gut that could have turned Lennox Lewis into a pile of mush.

Shock. Clear and sharp, painful and wrenching.

All of this surprise, all of this reverberation, wrought by a man whose transgressions should have been limited to blonde bimbos and Material Girls.

Years ago, I acquiesced to the fact that my childhood love, baseball, turned out to be smoke, mirrors and a whole lot more. The teams I grew up with were laboratories, comprised of dishonest DH’s and petulant pitchers all searching for an improper edge.

We all know the names. We all know their transgressions. Mark McGwire was the original villain, duping us first and cutting us the deepest. Roger Clemens was the angriest man this side of Christian Bale, a “clear” aftereffect of his usage. And Barry Bonds was despised, sick with jealousy, so his guilt was sealed long before the underpinnings of his game were revealed.

America had no problem condemning these traitors to history, these thieves of a nation’s loyalty. They were disreputable bunch, and their punishments more than fit their crimes.

But Alex Rodriguez was clean. He was a prodigy, a five-tool player who resembled Bonds’ early mold but checked his envy at Derek Jeter’s door. His power was uncompromised, lean and fit where McGwire was bulging and doughy. And while his cuckolding was unbecoming, his misbehavior landed him a relationship with a crypt-keeper named Madonna, an unenviable duty that even he didn’t deserve.

Sure, I hated the guy. I couldn’t stand the dispassion he displayed, his willingness to act as a mercenary rather than a man. I took solace in the fact that he’d never won a World Series. I grinned amidst the flurry of Monopoly money that greeted his returns to Seattle’s Safeco Field.

That was then. This, unfortunately, is now.

When I view A-Rod, A-Fraud, A-Roid, there will no longer be enmity flowing through my veins. Instead, there will be the chunks of concrete that have crumbled from baseball’s foundation, obliterated by a 2003 test whose results should never have been revealed to SI.com.

And yet they were. And now we’re stuck with the realization that America’s pastime will never have the comfort of continuity that it long provided.

Bringing the past into the present, creating the ties and relationships that only Marty McFly could experience, was always the greatest part of baseball. Achievements were cemented in decades, battered by wars and economic slumps, surviving our lineage and allowing comparison between the generations.

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