But the recent wave of scandals might finally manage to change that. Look at this year’s transgressions as a group, dispassionately, and some harsh lessons start to emerge. Money is king. Morality is selective. And we’ve entered an era in which athletic acts themselves — the elemental building blocks of competition — have become inherently untrustworthy.

If the Year of the Cheater drives these points home, it won’t be the death of sports fandom. But the content of fandom will change. Once we’ve reconciled ourselves to the obvious — that money and technology have made cheating an inextricable part of modern sport — we’ll be free to focus on the nuances of competition itself, from strategic brilliance to individual displays of athletic transcendence, instead of fretting over whether our favorite athletes are comporting themselves nobly.

This won’t make every cheater a hero. (It’s hard, for example, to find anything to praise about NBA ref-gone-wild Donaghy, who cheated solely for financial gain.) But when someone does cheat, we’ll forgo the sermonizing and appreciate their achievements anyway. Bonds may have enlisted the help of some top-notch chemists to set his new home-run mark. But he also relied on freakish hand-eye coordination, as well as an all-consuming will to sports power (remember, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa’s 1998 home-run derby may have pushed Bonds into his alleged dalliance with chemicals), and a superhuman knack for fending off and feeding off abuse from commentators and fans. Slap an asterisk on home-run ball No. 756 if you must, Mark Ecko; that’s still impressive stuff.

We might even conclude that certain cases of cheating deserve our not-so-grudging admiration. Take Belichick. After the videotaping scandal broke, Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis told us that Belichick’s late father Steve, a former assistant coach at the US Naval Academy, would surely have been ashamed by his son’s transgression. But would he? Here’s another possibility: perhaps Steve Belichick would have congratulated himself for raising a son so thirsty for success, so relentless in his focus, that he risked public opprobrium to give his already-dominant gridiron team yet another advantage.

But what about the games themselves? If we question the back-story to what we’re watching, will it still move us the way it used to? The guess here is that it will: on an aesthetic, primordial level, athletic feats are going to retain their emotional power. “Baseball fans may be very aware that there’s all sorts of stuff going on and not care — they still like watching the shortstop pick up the ball and throw over to first,” says Bill Littlefield, host of NPR’s Only a Game and author, recently, of a book of the same name. “They’re delighted by the grace and beauty that’s available at the ballpark. And I’m not sure that’s going to change.” In fact, we might even enjoy technical and aesthetic excellence more if we’re no longer fretting over the integrity of the athletes themselves.

The mental shift to a post-ethical fandom is more plausible than it sounds. Back in 1858, in the famous treatise “Saints, and their Bodies,” Massachusetts author Thomas Wentworth Higginson cast athletic activity as the sine qua non for American greatness. “Guarantee us against physical degeneracy,” Higginson wrote, “and we can risk all other perils — financial crises, Slavery, Romanism, Mormonism, Border Ruffians, and New York assassins . . . nothing can daunt us.” A century and a half later, Higginson’s claim for the curative power of sport sounds ridiculous — but come 2150, our own overblown notions of sports ethics probably will, too. And if they do, we’ll have the Year of the Cheater to thank.