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Ah, the time of year blog surfers and ESPN.com junkies fear the most: February. The time of year when neither baseball nor football is going on, and stories that deserve maybe six nanoseconds of fame get their much undeserved fifteen. When basketball provides nothing more to most than a few seconds on the highlight reel, and when we all start to come up with crazy trade hypotheticals and sports talk radio consists of the MC telling randomguy4 that the Seattle Mariners would not trade Ichiro to the Mets for Daniel Murphy.

So what happens when a huge story does break out in early February? Answer?

They make it last until March 1st.

Over the last week I have seen nothing short of a media frenzy over A-Rod’s somewhat disappointing admission to doing some sort of maybe kind of illegal drug that has a nickname no one knows and was obtained from a cousin we’re not even sure exists, for a duration that is at best suspect.

OK, yes, his story downright sucks. He’s lied several times and incriminated himself. He’s due to have a book come out about him soon that will probably sell like hotcakes as people try and find little shreds of evidence they can pile against the All-Star and speculate even more. I’m even sure a made-for-TV movie is going to come out starring Tony Danza as Alex Rodriguez.

But I still don’t care. I’m not even sure if people know why they care anymore, beyond the wild notion that this, amongst all other things, destroys the integrity of the game. Like the game of baseball was a holier than thou entity that all of a sudden got rocked by a scandal that only happens probably once every five minutes.

We need to accept as sports fans that steroid use is happening. We need to accept that it’s not going to stop until the game is no longer controlled by the players, or when fans actually do give a damn. The truth of the matter is, very few people actually care about A-Rod doing steroids. Maybe a couple thousand people will actively boycott games, even less will write letters, less still will picket Yankee stadium, and even less will stop watching the game altogether. No, that’s not going to be a sports fan’s solution. All this is, is something else for a few rows of Orioles fans to chant in their stadium when A-rod comes up to bat. They will somehow come to the conclusion that the way to punish Major League Baseball and show it “how it’s done” is to go to the game and yell profanities. Yep, your ticket money sure is showing them!

Let’s get real, people. Come October, if the Yankees win the World Series, no one is going to care or give any semblance of a damn even if they found needles outside the locker room shortly after game 7.

No one cares. Let me reiterate for you. No one actually cares.

I’m not wrong with this either. I know that at the end of the day, if my article somehow reaches the eyes of a few dozen, I will get comments by people who will seriously defend the notion that they are upset the integrity of the game was compromised and that they are going to take steps to show Major League Baseball how upset they are, but they won’t. People will talk at sports bars and on the street about how disappointing it is, but then they’ll go buy season tickets.

I think people approach steroids in sports much like people approach the Genocide in Darfur. Everyone is upset about it when someone brings it up. Everyone wants to donate 500 dollars to the cause and fly out to Africa to free the oppressed people when they hear about someone else doing it.

For some odd reason, an overwhelming amount of citizens in this country feel that they need to “Act the part” when it comes to situations where a negative or positive emotional response is elicited.

But you really aren’t fooling me, or yourself for that matter. Truth of the matter is, the next few days the media is going to try and keep this story on life support. Not only will they argue that A-Rod lied to them, but they will have you read several hundred pages of suspicions on which drug it was, who the identity of his cousin is, not to mention the interviewing attempts sportscasters will have in hopes that a member of the Yankees or any other team will say something controversial.

It’s OK that you really don’t care about this, but for the love of God, just stop acting like you do.

*Troy “T.J” Sparks is a contributor to Sports Jabber. With over 300+ blog posts written at TSOS, he has grown an affinity for Wordpress and fellow bloggers.