How appropriate this decade of sporting tragic-comedy, these 10 years of tainted home runs and personal scandal, when a lab in Northern California became infamous for steroids and a golfer in Florida became famous for immorality, would come to a close with a football coach and a school wallowing in embarrassment.

Here we are, signing Auld Acquaintance, hoisting toasts, wondering where the last year went and the next year may go, and a man who was featured not all that long ago in the New York Times Sunday magazine, ends up as the latest punching bag of the new Millennium.

Michael Lewis, the guy who wrote "Moneyball,'' the one who wrote "The Blind Side,'' profiled Leach virtually four years ago, December 2005 and made him sound like a cross between a mad scientist and gentle humanitarian.

"He's so different from every other football coach,'' Gary O'Hagan of IMG, Leach's agent told Lewis, "it's hard to understand how he's a football coach.''

For the moment, he's not. For the moment the enemies Mike Leach, Pepperdine law school graduate, collected along the way managed to get him fired by Texas Tech, a school where Leach turned flax into football gold.

What we see, or think we see, is not always what we get. Our decade, the BALCO decade, the Barry Bonds decade, the Plaxico Burress decade, the cyclist Floyd Landis decade, maybe most of all positively and negatively the Tiger Woods decade, has been disruptive, disillusioning.

Bill Belichick's Patriots videotaping, against the rules. Michael Vick staging dog fights, against the rules. Todd Bertuzzi's cheap shot. Accusations of soccer matches being fixed in Germany. Marion Jones losing her medals. We needed something upbeat as a coda. Instead, we received yet one final bit of bad news.

Why does it always have to come to this? Why did Bobby Knight, certainly one of the great basketball minds, have to be so self-destructive, irritate people just to show them up? Why did Mike Leach

alienate his bosses and, it appears from the stories, taunt a player who is best known as the son of onetime All-America and current ESPN announcer?

The end of the 2008 season, Tech and Leach, were at the top. That miraculous catch by Michael Crabtree along the sideline against Texas became legend and YouTube material. Now Leach is a pariah, a divisive figure.

Only Thursday, the last day of the year, of the decade, a Texas Tech assistant who criticized the player, Adam James, whom Mike Leach was to have mistreated, flipped and insisted Adam James has his support.

Adam is the son of Craig James, the onetime SMU running back who now works for ESPN. In a letter last week to school administrators, Lincoln Riley, the Tech offensive coordinator called Adam James "unusually lazy and entitled.''

Leach was fired after allegations that he mistreated James, placing him in a small, dark room, after James incurred a concussion.

Riley said, "I told (Adam James), I know we're on different sides of the fence, but he's still my player.''

What fence? Isn't team about unity? Isn't this Texas Tech disintegration a reflection of the decade? Or vice versa? Haven't there been so many headlines of disgrace, cheating in various forms, bitterness between former friends, one more doesn't seem to mean very much?

Or does the situation at Texas Tech, dumping a coach who is innovative, who is held in high regard by many, who gives less talented high school players the opportunity to play college ball, cause even more pain?

Trainers who set up athletes with drugs. Recruiters who fix up athletes with grades. Or payoffs.

Weren't the Chinese Olympic gymnasts underage? Wasn't that female Greek sprinter banned from '04 Olympics?

Serena Williams, our heroine, obscenely berating a line judge. Roger Federer, our hero, cursing in response to a chair umpire.

People have taken sides at Texas Tech. One team is now two teams. Some are blaming James. Some are blaming Leach. Maybe we simply ought to blame the nature of sports in the 2000s, edgy, pushing the envelope, pushing an opponent in the face.

Did the days of innocence ever really exist? Do we believe what a football coach says? What Tiger Woods says? What Roger Clemens says?

How satisfying it would have been to move into the next decade with tale of good news, something heartwarming. It wasn't to be.

"When you first meet him,'' one of Leach's players in 2005 told Michael Lewis about the coach, "you think he's the equipment manager.''

There's no longer any confusion. Unfortunately.