Heard the term for the first time Friday afternoon. Left me so agitated that I stammered and sputtered through six sets of Lewiston-Auburn stoplights, swearing at nobody in particular.

Phelps Phatigue.

Phooey!

It’s my own fault, really. This is precisely the reason I scour through my son’s French fry debris in the couch cushions and find the 54 cents per day that afford me the luxury of satellite radio.

Consuming a steady diet of Shooter Jennings, Iron Maiden and A Flock of Seagulls summarily shaves 20 points from my systolic blood pressure. It prevents me from hearing sports talk radio by accident.

Like a Weight Watchers lifer obeying the speed limit past Italian Bakery, I do backslide. Friday afternoon was one of those times, inspiring me to curse American culture and weep for it simultaneously.

To be sick of Michael Phelps’ transcendence is to be weary of Mom’s apple pan dowdy. It is symbolic of bad taste. It makes the sufferer both clueless and soulless.

Let me get this straight.

We just spent a month celebrating seven-plus years of self-absorption before the Boston Red Sox mercifully jettisoned Manny Ramirez to LAX.

Our senses tolerated 20 weeks of tears, indecision and posturing from Brett Favre.

Half of us cannot comprehend why Pete Rose doesn’t have his own wing in Cooperstown. The other half overlooks Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens’ alleged ethical shortfall without blinking, conceding that they merely took advantage of a loophole in baseball’s infamously unwritten code.

You or someone you love already has invested $150 in magazine purchases and more than half the waking hours in a random Sunday on an NFL fantasy draft.

Yet we’re already tired of The Greatest Accomplishment in the History of American Sports. This, even though the achiever in question couldn’t get arrested for jaywalking in a traditional news cycle.

See? You proved my point, sneering at the suggestion that Phelps should stand alone, a full head-and-shoulders above everyone else on our country’s mythical Mount Testosterone.

Yes, Phelps’ harvest of gold medals and world records in Beijing trumps Joltin’ Joe and the 56-game hitting streak.

It buries both of Wilt Chamberlain’s round numbers – 100 and 20,000 – by a slam dunk.

Tom Brady’s 50 touchdown tosses shrink to the level of a backyard game of Nerf.

The Tiger Slam? Close, but it’s still the equivalent of a Denny’s breakfast special weighed against a five-course brunch at the Waldorf.

Not even Lance Armstrong’s annual assault of the Alps in the first half of this decade will stand against Phelps’ eight-day reign in the land of human wrongs.

One reason sports engage us is that we’ve tried most of them, and in a perfect world, basked in our delusional daydreams.

We cranked a 220-foot blast to the power alley in our Little League park and pictured ourselves as Reggie Jackson or David Ortiz. We’ve swished three or four consecutive free throws through a hoop of the same height and dimensions as the one in Shaq’s personal gym. We’ve landed a white ball 260 yards downwind on a canvas of green well, at least once, courtesy of dumb luck. We’ve done a 90-minute loop around Lake Auburn and smirked to ourselves, Tour de What?

But none of us, not even the everyday swimmers and four-year varsity letter winners in our midst, can relate to Phelps’ constant shifting of gears, disciplines and muscle groups. The guy wins a gold medal and begins working on another one more quickly than Young Jeezy can wrap up the next track on his surgically attached iPod.

There’s no way to replicate that. Or the pressure involved in representing the stars and stripes, before an audience of billions, a dozen time zones away.

War makes us cynical, sometimes apologetic for our country and whatever we believe it represents. A badly wounded economy calls our priorities and way of life into question. Being let down by our sports heroes time after time, in mind-numbing succession, doesn’t leave much faith or room in our hearts for the next overexposed jock.

None of those are valid excuses.

Failure to appreciate this magic and recognize its uniqueness is pure Phoolishness.

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