Geoffrey Norman suggests giving the Athlete of the Year award to one of Michael Vick's dogs: "Those dogs played for truly big stakes. If Peyton Manning had blown the Super Bowl, he would have been out a few commercials. The dogs got hanged. Or worse."

As the Vick and Barry Bonds stories indicate, along with Tom Brady fathering a child out of wedlock, and all of the lesser crimes and misdemeanors of the players who make up the NFL, NBA and MLB, professional athletics in general ended 2007 looking awfully tawdry:

And that, in fact, might be the big sports story of 2007: the end, not of illusions, but of disillusionment. After all, in order to be disillusioned, you need illusions. The kid who pleaded, “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” to Shoeless Joe Jackson after the White Sox had fixed a World Series for the benefit of gamblers was honestly dismayed. He believed, quaintly, in the integrity of the game.

The games are the back-story, now. The 2007 Super Bowl? Boring, but winning it did get Peyton some more endorsements. World Series? Red Sox and ho hum. NBA finals? Can’t even remember. But the Barry Bonds story? That baby had legs. And the Mike Vick saga? Hard to think of a case, since Icarus, where the fortunes of a single star have soared so high and then crashed so spectacularly. You could have said it was “tragic,” if it hadn’t been for the dogs. Those poor beasts made it merely tawdry; like just about everything else in sports in the unlamented year of two thousand and seven.

Update: While I mentioned the Patriots' Tom Brady above, I forgot to mention his coach's win-at-all-costs predilection for illicit videotaping, yet another lowpoint for the NFL this year.