The major issue, of course, is steroids, a subject on which everyone has an opinion but scarcely anyone has any hard facts.  Except for a handful of players, we can’t be certain who actually took steroids.  We can’t agree on whether taking steroids really constitutes cheating – if there weren’t any rules against taking a certain substance, many feel, how can you actually say someone cheated?  Or so some arguments go.

We don’t even agree on what actually constitutes steroids. The truth of the matter is that very few of the sportswriters weighing in on the subject really know much about them.  We lump all performance enhancing drugs under the heading of “steroids” in an effort to sweep them aside and brand them as evil;  after years of reading about them, I am still not sure why human growth hormones are bad or why they’re banned. (I know there’s a rational answer to a question I have often asked, namely if HGH heals injuries faster, why is it wrong to use it?  But no one has yet given me an answer I can understand.)

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I thought I knew baseball and business. Working with Marvin quickly disavowed me of this notion. But within a year and a half, I got an education. Meeting with him every other day for almost 18 months,  Marvin and his wife, Terry – “the dynamic Terry Miller,” as sportswriter Bud Collins  called her – proved to be a revelation.

To be honest, I really didn’t know how important Marvin Miller was to baseball and all of professional sports. I didn’t find out until I began interviewing his contemporaries. There’s a quote you’ve probably been reading or hearing in the blizzard of praise since Marvin’s death was announced yesterday, the great old-time Brooklyn Dodgers and later New York Yankees announcer Red Barber saying, “Marvin Miller, along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, is one of the three most important men in baseball history.”

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In 1989, two years after "Bonfire of the Vanities" was published, Tom Wolfe wrote a 10,000-word essay for Harper’s. “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” was, Wolfe wrote,  “a literary manifesto for the new social novel” and a shout-out for literary realism.

After World War II, Wolfe argued, “Among the fashionable European ideas that began to circulate was that of ‘the death of the novel,’ by which was meant the realistic novel. Writing in 1948, Lionel Trilling gave this notion a late-Marxist twist that George Steiner and others would elaborate on. The realistic novel, in their gloss, was the literary child of the nineteenth-century industrial bourgeoisie.  It was a slice of life, a cross section, that provided a true and powerful picture of individuals and society – as long as the bourgeois order and the old class system were firmly in place. But now that the bourgeoisie was in a state of ‘crisis and rout’ (Steiner’s phrase) and the old class system was crumbling, the realistic novel was pointless. What could be more futile than a cross section of disintegrating fragments?”

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It’s historical,  as I’m sure you know by now. It details how six American hostages were whisked out of Iran after the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in 1979. It’s political, offering a fair and incisive account of how both the American CIA and the Iranian rebels contributed to the crisis. And it reintroduces suspense as the primary element in a thriller.

After directing two fine films that were top-heavy with violence, “Gone Baby Gone” and “The Town,” Affleck has now made a movie almost devoid of violence but long on suspense. The biggest surprise of all: “Argo” is hip. It keeps getting the audience to hold its collective breath only to let it out laughing.

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In an event so remarkable that most of the sports press still doesn’t seem to know what to make of it, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo spoke out a few weeks ago in support of a Maryland ballot initiative that would legalize gay marriage. To quickly recap what happened next: Maryland State delegate Emmett C. Burns Jr. wrote to Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti requesting “that you take the necessary action, as a National Football League Owner, to inhibit such expressions” and that Ayanbadejo “be ordered to cease and desist such injurious actions." Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe responded to Burns in a scathing open letter that quickly went viral: “I find it inconceivable that you are an elected official of Maryland’s state government. Your vitriolic hatred and bigotry make me ashamed and disgusted to think that you are in any way responsible for shaping policy at any level.”

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Victor Conte, the founder of BALCO (Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative) who was jailed for distributing steroids, was asked by USA Today what  percentage of the players he thought might be taking a secret advantage? “I would say,” said Conte,” maybe as much as half of baseball.”

I would say that Victor Conte is blowing smoke out of his rear end. Let's stick with what we do know about the number of players who have used performance enhancing drugs. In 2003, after years of bickering on the subject, Major League Baseball and its players union finally agreed to a plan for random drug testing. Almost 1,200 players were tested – anonymously – and if the percentage of positives was over 5 percent, then testing would be incorporated into the next Basic Agreement. The number of users proved to be 104, or to be precise, 7.7 percent of all players under a major league contract. That’s why, since 2004, MLB has had a formal testing program.

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That professional basketball players would be allowed into Olympic competition was probably inevitable after the 1972 games, which was the first time the U.S. team had not won the gold medal in roundball since it became an Olympic sport in 1936. A Russian team who were amateurs in name only upset a team of American college boys. Americans were shocked when Frank Gifford, who was doing the commentary, bellowed “Aleksandr Belov …”  as the massive Russian center rammed home the wining shot as time expired. Coaches and players across the country grumbled: “If the Russian can have what amounts to a professional team, why can’t we use our pros?” 1988 settled it: American college boys couldn’t even bring home the silver, just bronze.

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All month long the Americans had been talking about the need to improve their baton exchange, a much discussed topic since Beijing 2008, when the men’s team was disqualified during the heats for dropping their batons. This time they got it right, but it didn’t matter at all -- when one of the fastest men in the world, Ryan Bailey, took the last exchange for the Americans, he was up against Bolt. “As soon as I got the baton,” Bailey said after the race, “I was thinking: run for your life.”

The American team set a new U.S. record of 37.04; the Jamaicans set a new world record of 36.89. Beating the Americans by just about exactly the amount of time it takes Usain Bolt to turn off the lights and get in bed before the room is dark. Afterwards, Bailey said the right thing: “It was an honor to compete against him.” And of course it was. When you’re matched up against the greatest in the world, it’s because your coach and your team thinks you have the best chance of beating him.

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In Sydney, the American team, anchored by gold medalist Marion Jones, only took a bronze after a very poor exchange between Torri Edwards and Nanceen Perry.

In Athens, Lauryn Williams, who had already won a silver in the 100m, botched an exchange on the final leg, and the American women failed to medal. Four years later in Beijing, the U.S. didn’t make it to the finals when Edwards and Williams couldn’t connect in the semifinal.

Those of us who watch the Olympics without closely following these sports in the intervening four years tend to come away with a sense of the inevitability of records falling, and for the most part that’s true. But the sports whose records take the longest to fall are the ones that demand a combination of athleticism and teamwork.

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The most iconic group of women athletes this country has ever produced came up with the biggest American team triumph since the Miracle on Ice in 1980. I think this one was even more important. The victory of the U.S. hockey team over the Soviets 32 years ago was a relic of the Cold War, blown out of proportion  by a mush-headed worldview in which political failures are somehow redeemed by sporting events.

Anyway, Americans didn’t head toward the skating rinks in droves in the succeeding years to become hockey players. But Abby Wambach, Alex Morgan, Tobin Heath, Hope Solo and the other members of the American women’s soccer team weren’t playing a perceived national enemy. If anything, their epic battles with the Japanese women for international supremacy in soccer has been the friendliest intense rivalry imaginable.

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You’ll remember that she lost in Beijing when she hit the next-to-last hurdle – and how weird, the next-to-last, not the last when you expect your energy to give out – and just missed out on the gold.

It’s fairly safe to say that of all the American athletes who had yet to win a gold medal, Lolo is the most hyped, making the cover of Time, a spread in Rolling Stone, a semi-nude shot in ESPN magazine, a guest spot on Jay Leno. In fact, she probably received more press than all other U.S. athletes except our swimmers, Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte.

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If Andy Murray’s victory over Roger Federer Sunday is a story of redemption, just think about what it’s going to be like on Thursday when the U.S women's soccer team gets a rematch against Japan with a gold medal on the line.

There are those who would argue Team USA’s World Cup loss last summer to the Japanese far outweighs whatever happens in London this week; after all, they say, soccer really doesn’t even belong in the Olympics. To this I would reply: They were saying the same thing about tennis a short time ago. So now ask Andy Murray if the gold medal means as much to him as whatever they give the winner at Wimbledon.

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The 100m final is, traditionally, the glamour event of the Olympics, the marquee race of the games. That was especially true this time with Bolt, who dazzled in Beijing, looking to become just the second man in Olympic history to win consecutive gold medals in the event. (Carl Lewis is the other.) And the greedy, calculating bastards who run NBC decided everyone in the U.S. should watch horses jumping over obstacles while the fastest man in the world won his gold -- so they could make more money by running it in prime time.

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With six minutes left, the U.S. team, made up of future Hall of Famers, was trailing to … not Russia, not Spain, but Lithuania. Yes, the Lithuania whose estimated population of 3.2 million is about a quarter of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The same Lithuanian team that lost to Nigeria a month ago, a team the U.S. beat by 83 points last week.

And then, like in a bad sports movie, LeBron came off the bench, took on their best player –  Linas Kleiza, who plays for the Toronto Raptors – and stayed on him much of the time. LeBron scored 9 of his 20 points, pulled down two rebounds, stole a ball, and said to Team USA, in the words of U.S. coach Mike Krzyzewski, “I got this. I’m doing this.”

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If you think the British are reserved, you did not hear the roar that greeted their own Jessica Ennis, the poster girl, literally, for British athletics in the 2012 London Olympics. The pressure Ennis was under Friday as she lined up for the first event of the heptathlon – which unofficially determines the world’s best female athlete -- must have made what Andy Murray went through at Wimbledon last month seems like a Frisbee toss in Hyde Park.

Before these games, you may not have known Jessica’s face, but you may have probably seen her washboard-toned midriff on billboards all over the city and even in a field on the landing pattern into Heathrow. NBC cameramen could not resist, zooming in Ms. Ennis’ midsection at least four times during the first day. Her latest honor is a perfect likeness in wax at  Madame Tussaud’s.

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Nothing Coe said was disrespectful in the slightest: “You can probably say that clearly, self-evidently, in medal tally he’s the most successful,” Coe said Wednesday.  “My personal view is that I am not sure he’s the greatest, but he’s the most successful. That goes without saying.”

Nothing there was intended to diminish Phelps’ achievement. And why, after all, is Coe obligated to say that Phelps is the greatest? I particularly liked it when he said, “This is the global pub game: ‘Who is the greatest Olympian of all?’ I could go around this entire room, we’d all come up with different interpretations on that, but you have to say he’s up there.”

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Beach volleyball has only been an Olympic event since 1996. But, as the Times – that’s the London Times – reported yesterday, “It's quickly becoming a crowd-pleaser.”

And not merely the crowd, but the right crowd. After spending all day at Monday’s matches, Prince Albert of Monaco gushed to a BBC reporter, “I’m such a fan, I built my own court.  It’s just fantastic.”

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In contrast, Michael was happy to give me the first thing that came off the top of his head. For instance, when he wasn’t in his Spartan-like regimen, what did he like to gorge on? “Oh, man, give me French vanilla ice cream served in big-ass waffle cones with so many Butterfinger chips that you’ve got to fight to get to the ice cream.” He loved DMX’s “Party Up” – “especially the extended version, the one that runs for nine minutes.”

That was pretty much the interview; the kid already had an agent, who told me, “We’ve had to turn down media. Every 15 minutes in Michael’s life is accounted for.” I thought, that’s a shame, because Michael really enjoyed being a boy, and I wished he had more time to work at it.

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It isn’t a football story just because the most famous and venerated coach in college football, Joe Paterno, is at the center of it. It isn’t a football story because Jerry Sandusky was a longtime assistant coach – and close friend – to Joe Paterno.

It isn’t even a football story because another assistant coach and former quarterback for the Nittany Lions, Mike McQueary, testified that he witnessed Sandusky abusing a young boy in the team’s locker room showers.

It’s a football story because all of the above and more, particularly that former Penn State president Graham Spanier, former vice president Gary Schultz and athletic director Tim Curley, according to independent investigator Louis Freeh, “All played a part in concealing the facts of Jerry Sandusky’s abuse.”

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