First of all, I’m clean.

Anybody who has competed against me in sports could tell you that I’ve not used performance-enhancing drugs. A person could not miss as many lay-ups as I have or fallen so far behind the people I am supposed to be defending while under the influence of the “clear” or the “cream,” two of the steroids Barry Bonds may have perjured himself about.

So I can shake my fist in anger that someone may despoil sports by using a chemical crutch. But even after the shoe finally dropped Thursday with the indictment of Bonds, the lesson from the steroid debate is still murky.

Aren’t sports scientists going to get ever better at creating (and concealing the presence of) performance-enhancing drugs, as in any other pharmaceutical endeavor? Weren’t there dozens of guys besides Bonds who turned into studs overnight a few years ago? Aren’t college and pro football players increasingly odd human specimens, compared to their counterparts 15 or 30 years ago? With Olympic pressures and millions of dollars on the line in the pros, how can steroid use realistically be kept out of sports?

Major league baseball, as much as I have enjoyed following it all my life, is entertainment, and even if it collapsed in controversy (not likely, according to record-setting attendance and revenue figures), the world would not end. However, it is depressing and serious to think about high school and other athletes who see this shady way of getting an edge and decide to exploit it, violating their own bodies and the spirit of the games they play at the same time.

Preventing that would be the best reason for federal prosecutors and the governing bodies of sport to set high standards and enforce them, despite what may be a never-ending chase with those seeking an unethical chemical boost.

As far as the Bonds saga, there is just no character to like in this movie. Not Bonds, an undeniably great athlete whose changing physical appearance and eye-popping performance in the crucial years made his denials seem implausible even before the indictment.

Not the federal government, which spent years and dollars in pursuit of what is merely an obstruction of justice indictment — essentially a claim that Bonds lied in his own defense. The case raises the specter of unequal treatment, as a non-superstar may not have been worthy of a four-year federal chase.

Not the sports media, which seems to have taken threads — Bonds’ mercurial personality, his failure to warm up to the celebrity side of superstardom, his rare capacity for the good quote and his special treatment even beyond that of the average pampered athlete — to stitch together the case that he’s just a bad guy.

Not the San Francisco Giants, who placed Bonds’ chase of home run records on one side of the ledger and evidence of suspicious activities on the other, laid it all on a grid and reached for the maximum profit with minimum risk.

Bad movie. Wish it would end.