The major news coming out of the world of sports in recent days has been on the far side of gloomy. Steroids, point-shaving and dogfighting are not terms that comfortably fit baseball, basketball and football, but they have been tightly linked with those sports by the news of the day.

Although it all tends to lend an atmosphere of impending doom to the three major sports, nothing could be further from the truth.

We live in the golden age of sports, an era where society is far more fascinated with games than it ever has been. To suggest, in the case of football and basketball, the misguided actions of one person will bring down the sport or even come close to doing that is preposterous. Neither of the alleged crimes, betting on games by NBA referee Tom Donaghy and dogfighting by Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, will have anything but a momentary and minor effect on the NBA and NFL.

To prove that point, just take a look at baseball, which has been dogged by a steroids scandal for the better part of this century. Most of the public agrees that many of the record-breakers, particularly Barry Bonds, used chemical enhancement to achieve their level of excellence. Bonds is easily the most disliked player in the history of the sport. There are strong suggestions in the media that the scandal is causing severe damage to the game.

Even Sports Illustrated is acting as if the sky is falling on baseball. It its current issue, the magazine wrote, " ... the Bonds saga has, to some degree, sucked the lifeblood out of baseball."

Yet in the same issue the magazine points out two facts that clearly show the sport is enjoying unprecedented success.

The average attendance at 16 games on July 21 was 39,977, an all-time record.

Baseball total revenue has gone for $3 billion in 2000 to $5.2 billion in 2006, as astonishing increase of 93 percent.

Additionally, attendance records are being broken every year. The 16-team National League sold 41,578,618 tickets last season, the third consecutive year a new record was set. The 14-team American League sold 34,464,169 tickets, also the third consecutive record-breaking year.

Those who claim the sport is teetering and past its prime cannot refute those numbers.

If Major League Baseball can continue to leap ahead in terms of revenue and popularity in the face of a scandal that involves many players over several years, surely, the NFL and NBA can do the same with their disgraces.

The betting scandal in the NBA is the more serious of the two because it affects the integrity of the game. It's possible, although charges haven't been filed against Donaghy, that he affected the outcome of games. Keep in mind though, he is one person. No evidence has yet been shown that the scandal goes beyond Donaghy.

If anyone believes the actions of one man, no matter how crooked, can affect the popularity of the sport, they haven't been following the history of basketball and betting. Such scandals, only worse because they involved players, have rocked college basketball for almost every decade since the 1950s. Yet the sport has had phenomenal growth.

In the early 1950s, it was New York City. In the late 1970s, it was Boston College. It 1985 it was Tulane, in 1994 Arizona State and 1995 Northwestern.

Although the 1950s scandal, when New York City had several nationally renown teams that were part of the point-shaving, nearly ruined the sport, none of the others have so much as made it pause. The popularity of college basketball is at an all-time high and the NCAA tournament is one of the major sporting events of the year.

If college basketball can withstand repeated scandals, the NBA can more than handle this one. The league will proceed next season almost as if nothing happened.

Likewise, Vick's problems will affect only him and the Falcons. The sport is way too big to be sidetracked by one person, regardless of how despicable his crimes may be.

In fact, Vick's problems could have a cleansing effect on sports. Nothing else has been able to clean up what might properly be called the criminal element of the NFL. The disgrace heaped upon Vick if he is found guilty, plus the likely significant jail time he'll receive, could change lives of those who thought Vick was a peer to emulate.

That might be wishful thinking. But to believe the three major sports will continue to have extraordinary popularity despite these scandals is not.