That sigh of relief you heard Thursday afternoon escaped from my little corner of the world, where the occupant is eternally grateful that Barry Bonds escaped indictment, for now.

The death penalty is too humane for certain people. It’s more fun to keep them here in plain sight for a decade or two or three and hope that life will serve up a fate more spectator-friendly than eternal damnation.

Which is how I feel about Bonds.

Prison, suspension or involuntary retirement as punishment for his alleged perjury and tax evasion would constitute the easy way out. It is infinitely more fun to watch him remain a free man, hobble around, whack meaningless home runs, make a complete jackass of himself and tie his own rope with every word.

As a professional athlete and pop culture icon, Bonds is done. He is imprisoned in his private hell, without parole.

O.J. Simpson is free to play golf and pawn the remaining trinkets from his football career while searching for the real killer. Bonds doesn’t have the same luxury of scouring the earth for the real junkie hanger-on who blew him up like the Michelin Man, in part because he already knows who they are. He thirsts for such liberty and will never sip.

Seriously, if you love the game of baseball, have you spent five seconds truly considering what this miserable ball of atrophy has done to the game that once defined America?

Hours after serving up the latest proof that justice is neither swift nor guaranteed in this country, Bonds swatted the 722nd home run of his career.

Seven hundred and twenty-bleeping-two! Achieved naturally, that total would have insane ramifications.

Networks that don’t cost $59.95 a month to pipe through your flat screen would be pre-empting summer reruns to show live cut-ins of every at-bat. The national media would have such a story on its hands that it could afford to stop trying to manufacture artificial, mainstream interest in Michelle Wie and Floyd Landis.

Alas, the number is meaningless. Hearing that Bonds hit another home run is like hearing that Pat Robertson just leg-pressed a three-story house. You either yawn or sneer.

Whether the surly, self-absorbed poster child of this sports generation rots in jail while frozen at No. 722 or discovers the elixir of youth in the bottom of a test tube and gets to 1,000, the end result is the same.

Instead of a bust and a Giants cap, visitors to Cooperstown will see a syringe and a big, fat asterisk engraved into Bonds’ obligatory plaque.

Pete Rose will always find a jock-sniffing dupe to make the case that he was “only” a compulsive gambler. Sadder still, other baseball historians submit that Ty Cobb was “only” a miserable, racist lout. Thumb through the remaining list of lesser lights enshrined in the Hall of Fame and you’ll never lack for an apologist who opines that so-and-so was “only” a drunken whoremonger.

What will be said of Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro? I suppose that they were “only” the generation that destroyed the value of statistics, forever.

Oh, you’ll find people tripping over themselves to be Bonds’ public defender. But most of them are former Major Leaguers turned analysts, now holding a financial stake in sucking up to Bonds under the blinding light of an ESPN camera.

In the real world, in the real courtroom of public opinion that doesn’t cower to professional athletes, a verdict was returned months, even years ago. It was fair, speedy, unequivocal and accurate.

Guilty.

Barry Bonds is guilty as sin. Guilty of selling his soul, and guilty of mortgaging what was once a legitimate Hall of Fame career for the flawed American Dream of filthy lucre and 120-point headlines. He will die a lonely, angry, incomplete and most likely (based on what more than one person vouches he did to abuse his body) young man.

What a grand jury surmises, then, is essentially meaningless. We’re talking about Barry Bonds. The day he goes to jail is the same day Paris Hilton actually keeps her recent vow of chastity.

Having him in uniform and in denial is infinitely more fun, anyway. Nothing he accomplishes from this day forward can retrieve his soul or repair his reputation. It can only make his life and legacy worse.

Let’s enjoy the ride.

Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His e-mail is [email protected].