NO. 756: A DAY OF MOURNING.

Byline: PAUL OBERJUERGE

Hang the black crepe. Draw the blinds. Sack cloth and ashes all around, please.

Barry Bonds is about to eclipse Henry Aaron.

A cheater has prospered, and a baseball nation weeps.

What ought to be cause for celebration is, instead, reason for consternation.

A drug-enhanced fraud is about to break Aaron's career record for home runs, 755.

Excuse us, if we don't throw a party.

Excuse us if we throw up instead.

It's not because Barry Bonds is an arrogant churl. Though he certainly is.

It's not because his final pursuit of Aaron has been a stage-managed farce that has damaged his team's ability to compete.

Though it has.

What angers and disgusts almost every intelligent observer of the game is how Bonds got to where he is.

Illicitly. Illegally. Immorally.

Don't give me the "he's never failed a drug test" line. Not when his best friend is a convicted steroids dealer who is in federal prison for refusing to testify against Bonds.

Not when Bonds' career trajectory went wildly askew beginning in 1999, when he showed up at spring training with the body of Frankenstein's monster.

Not when authors Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams painstakingly outline, in their book "Game of Shadows," how Bonds used steroids, testosterone, insulin and human growth hormone to turn himself into the greatest slugger chemistry could create.

And he did it for all the wrong reasons.

Because he was jealous.

Bonds had a great season in 1998. He batted .303 with 37 homers, 44 doubles, 25 steals, 120 runs and 122 RBIs.

But he was overshadowed that season by the single-season homer chase put on by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, two other unnaturally chiseled sluggers. Bonds was jealous. Angry, according to Fainaru-Wada and Williams.

He was ready to cheat. He chose to sell his soul, to turn himself from a great all-around player, lithe but powerful and already a three-time MVP, into a muscle-bound freak. Stiff, bloated, injury-prone, a defensive liability. All for the sake of home runs.

The results almost were immediate.

A hitter who averaged one homer every 16.2 at-bats the first 13 years of his career suddenly started blasting home runs every 9.1 at-bats.

Including a record 73 in 2001, trashing McGwire's record, Bonds hit 292 homers (39 percent of his career total) in the six bustin'-out-of-his-jersey seasons from 1999-2004.

In the process, he became a baseball pariah, booed and scorned in every baseball park in the nation that wasn't in San Francisco.

Fans didn't hold up signs reading "cheater" ... they didn't chant "STAIR-roids, STAIR-roids" ... because journalists convinced them Bonds was cheating. They had eyes to see. They decided on their own.

They knew they were looking at a man who ought to be remembered as "The Unnatural."

Bonds is so universally disliked he would be booed if he catches and/or eclipses Aaron on the road. While Giants fans nightly embarrass themselves by applauding the Darth Vader of baseball.

Don't look for Aaron to be there. A man of great dignity, who played in an era when players trained on steak and potatoes, not hormones and steroids -- and when much of America openly was rooting against a black man to break Babe Ruth's record -- won't be around to see Bonds break the record.

Turns out, Aaron won't even speak to him.

Hammerin' Hank knows the score, too.

So let Barry do his thing. Let Giants fans applaud.

The rest of us will do our best to ignore it at all. To try our best to forget the Great Malefactor who perverted the game for a decade.

And we will get on to rooting for Alex Rodriguez or Albert Pujols to get busy and see if they can make Barry Bonds' stay in the record books a short one.

Today, we mourn a game hijacked by a bad man. Excuse us if we don't applaud.