The headlines from the Summer of 1998 went off just like the fireworks that erupted over the rim of Busch Stadium whenever Mark McGwire homered, thus striking another mighty blow against everything that was wrong with baseball, everything that was wrong with the nation.

"Baseball is back," declared Time magazine on July 27.

The spectacle of the Mark McGwire vs. Sammy Sosa home run derby was a pleasant distraction in a roiling, combustible 1998. McGwire and Sosa lifted the collective national mood that had been brought down by U.S. Embassy bombings, school shootings in Arkansas and Oregon, and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

"If you want to say what we’ve done has brought America together, well, it has," McGwire said late in the 1998 season.

That was right around the time bemused Cincinnati Reds manager Jack McKeon spoke of receiving voice mails from fans, begging him to have his pitchers challenge McGwire.

"They say, ‘Don’t walk him. Let McGwire hit so he can heal the country,’’’ McKeon said. "Who am I to stand in the way?"

McGwire and Sosa took their circus maximus home run show on the road, playing before packed baseball houses across America. Except when McGwire’s Cardinals and Sosa’s Cubs faced each other, the two sluggers would duel on separate fields, a thousand miles apart, but they managed to reconnect millions of fans. Yes, they were that powerful.

It was the summer of scoreboard watching and incessant updates from ESPN. It was before the age of the Blackberry, so nervous home run addicts who couldn’t see the game or conduct quick Internet searches in their palm would duck out of meetings or the kid’s piano recital to make a quick call, or ask a stranger:

Did McGwire hit one tonight?

What about Sosa?

Baseball needed them: the big redwood from Southern California and the cheerful carnival performer from the Dominican Republic.

The sport hadn’t recovered from the labor shutdown of 1994, which led to the cancellation of the ’94 World Series, and a delay to the start of the 1995 season. Average attendance at MLB games was 31,612 before baseball locked the gates. But after play resumed, the average attendance plummeted to 25,260 in 1995.

Cal Ripken Jr. certainly helped restore the game’s pulse late in the ’95 season by breaking Lou Gehrig’s remarkable record for consecutive games played. But that brought on only a slight bounce in attendance in 1996 and ’97.

When McGwire and Sosa began depositing baseballs over the walls, Major League Baseball cashed in. Average attendance in 1998 jumped to 29,054 per game.

The growth continued, pretty much unabated, with average attendance reaching 30,401 in 2004 and increasing every subsequent year, up to 33,753 so far in 2008. This will mark the fifth consecutive season of record attendance for MLB. And industry revenue will reach $6 billion for the first time.

McGwire and Sosa deserve credit for their role in relaunching the game.

"It was a miracle," said Hall of Fame baseball manager Sparky Anderson. "Sosa and McGwire were just what the game needed at the time."

McGwire and Sosa pumped adrenaline into the tired old veins of our national pastime. It was pure joy. This baseball summer of love extended to MLB press boxes, where breathless sportswriters, including yours truly, were enthralled by the Sammy vs. Big Mac lollapalooza. Along the way, we had to learn how to spell a complex new word, androstenedione — even though we never worried much about learning about the role the supplement could have played in enhancing McGwire’s strength.

Looking back on the way that I and many others covered the home run race makes me think of an old observation offered by the famous New York sportswriter Jimmy Cannon, who said: "We are the vaudevillians of journalism. Our small dramas quickly fade, and we illuminate no men’s lives." Ouch. But in this example, warranted.

The innocence was further shattered by Jose Canseco’s book, BALCO, all things Barry Bonds, McGwire’s shaky testimony before Congress, Brian McNamee vs. Roger Clemens, the Mitchell Report and the angst over seeing honorable men such as Hank Aaron and Roger Maris lose their HR records.

We learned that maybe the baseball heroes were pumping something else into their own veins — something that was a bit more potent than Flintstone vitamins, something that wasn’t so pure, after all.

And our wide-eyed wonderment would be replaced by another look: one of hardened, gimlet-eyed suspicion.

As fans, we developed ’roid rage of a different type. Didn’t matter what the sport was. That Olympic sprinter? Obviously, steroids. That aging pitcher who could still blaze fastballs? On the juice. Look at those football players! They’re big enough to eat hay.

Even though Major League Baseball has toughened up its policies in an attempt to curtail the use of performance-enhancing drugs, the industry continues to take hits on the issue.

The Mitchell Report brought the anger back to the surface. During a round of Congressional hearings earlier this year, Betty McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat, described baseball as an enterprise rooted in "a criminal conspiracy that defrauded millions of baseball fans of billions of dollars."

I suppose McGwire and Sosa, who set off the home run frenzy, get some of the blame for that. Directly or indirectly, their homers generated a revival, then ridicule, then reform.

In 1998, we had to watch the McGwire-Sosa show. Ten years later, after the loss of innocence, we still watch baseball, and in large numbers. But here’s the difference: We’ll never watch the games the same way again. We can never trust that what we’re seeing is real.