The year in sports

Barry Bonds' approach to Henry Aaron's lifetime home run record of 755 provided the baseball season with a long, strange psychodrama. San Francisco fans, and almost no one else, cheered when Bonds broke the record in a home game in August; one of baseball's most respected figures had been supplanted by the face of the steroid era. After the season, Bonds would be indicted on perjury charges for allegedly lying to a grand jury in the investigation of the BALCO lab when he said he'd never knowingly taken steroids.

Bonds, now a free agent with 762 career home runs, pleaded not guilty and is expected to go on trial in 2008.

Though the baseball postseason ended with a fizzle -- the Sox's win over the Colorado Rockies was the third World Series sweep in four years -- the regular season ended like firecrackers. The Rockies made the postseason by winning 13 of their last 14 games just to earn a tie for the wild card with the San Diego Padres.

They won a humdinger of a one-game playoff in extra innings, then swept the Philadelphia Phillies and Arizona Diamondbacks in the playoffs. They reached the World Series having won 10 straight and an astonishing 21 out of 22. Then they got swept.

The New York Mets crashed as spectacularly as the Rockies soared. On the morning of Sept. 14, the Mets led the National League East by six and a half games and had won 10 of their last 12. Starting that night they were swept by the second-place Phillies, the beginning of a 5-12 tumble that knocked them out of the playoffs, the Phillies winning the division instead. The Mets went 1-6 in the last week of the season, a pratfall as spectacular as Philadelphia's own famous nosedive in 1964.

The big news of baseball's other season, the offseason free-agent frenzy, was New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez opting out of the last three years of his famous 10-year, $252 million contract and re-signing with the team for 10 years, $275 million. A-Rod and his agent, Scott Boras, angered the baseball world by announcing his decision to opt out during a World Series game.

In the NFL Peyton Manning shed his reputation as a big-game loser by leading the Indianapolis Colts to their first Super Bowl victory since the 1970 season, when the team played in Baltimore. Along the way the Colts beat their habitual playoff tormentors, the Patriots, in a thrilling AFC Championship Game that included a comeback from a 21-3 deficit.

The Super Bowl, in which the Colts beat the Chicago Bears, 29-17, was the first to match two black head coaches, Tony Dungy of Indianapolis and Lovie Smith of Chicago. It was also the first Super Bowl played in the rain. And it was the first played in the rain by two teams with black head coaches.

The Colts and Patriots met again in Week 9 of the 2007 season in a game that wags semi-facetiously dubbed the "Game of the Century." It was the latest week in an NFL season that two undefeated clubs had met. The Patriots won 24-20 and kept on winning, 16 in a row to become the first NFL team to go undefeated in the regular season since the Miami Dolphins in 1972, when the NFL season was only 14 games long.

New England's perfect record was marred in the eyes of many -- including Don Shula, who coached the '72 Dolphins -- for what came to be known as "Spygate." During the first quarter of the first game of the season, against the New York Jets in New Jersey, NFL security officials confiscated a video camera and tape from a Patriots employee who had been pointing the camera at the Jets bench, which is against the rules because such tape could be used to decode coaches' signals.

Shula went so far as to say at midseason that if the Pats went undefeated, their record should have an asterisk because they gained an illegal advantage, though it's unclear how a team could gain enough of an edge to win 16 straight games from less than one quarter of taping on opening day. Shula later backed off from his comment.

The Patriots were fined $250,000, coach Bill Belichick was dinged for twice that much, and the Pats were docked their first-round draft pick in 2008. Whether that punishment was appropriate or a slap on the wrist largely depends on what team you root for.

The Bears took the traditional path of the Super Bowl loser and stumbled through the '07 season, missing the playoffs. They were replaced atop the NFC by two historic powers, the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys, who were led by similar quarterbacks.

A resurgent 37-year-old Brett Favre led the Packers to their first playoff berth in three years while Tony Romo, a Wisconsin kid who grew up idolizing Favre, recovered from a disastrous muffed snap that cost the Cowboys a playoff win in January to take his place among the league's elite players in the fall.

Throughout the year the health of former NFL players continued to gain prominence as an issue. Congress held hearings, and former and current players tried to raise money for and consciousness about ex-players with serious health issues, many of whom blame the league and the players union for failing to help them despite their role in helping to build the NFL into a multibillion-dollar business.

In college football, that Boise State win over Oklahoma --exciting as it was -- was essentially an exhibition game. The bowl game that counts, the BCS Championship Game, was played a week later, and Florida routed Ohio State 41-14.

Eight months later the tone was set for the 2007 season when Appalachian State, a member of the so-called NCAA Football Championship Subdivision -- formerly known as Division I-AA -- beat Michigan in Ann Arbor. Appalachian State would go on to win the -- oh, let's just call it Division I-AA -- championship.

Division I-A, officially known as the Football Bowl Subdivision, would go through a topsy-turvy season, with teams cycling in and out of the top 10 willy-nilly, only to end up with usual suspects Ohio State and LSU scheduled to meet in the BCS Championship Game Jan. 8.

This year's Boise State -- that is, the undefeated smaller-conference team shut out of the championship picture, illustrating once again that Division I-A is a league in which not everyone is eligible for the championship -- is Hawaii.

Next page: The Spurs take their fourth NBA championship, John Amaechi comes out ...