Orlando, Fla. ? Injustice, the fight has begun anew.

We will beat you this time, just as we have before. You keep inventing ways to deprive us, divide us, distract us, but we remain strong and determined. We will win.

We will make poker a sport.

Injustice, we will triumph once more. You put up a wall in Berlin, but you could not stop us. You invented apartheid and slavery, but you could not stop us. You made Shaq leave Orlando, but you could not stop us. So you cannot stop us now.

We are vast and mighty. We made archery a sport. We made curling a sport. We made it so David Wells could play baseball right after a steak dinner. You cannot stop us now.

Make room for poker. The movement has begun. ESPN now runs a countdown to the next airing of the World Series of Poker. One day, the clock at the bottom of the screen read nine hours, 54 minutes, 13 seconds. The most-searched words on espn.com at one point were, in order, Tiger Woods, the NFL and poker.

Poker is going mainstream. It no longer wants to be the obsessive hobby of men who like to gamble and drink, preferably at once. Poker has Olympic aspirations.

Check out this Web site: PokerInAthens.org. A group is garnering support to make poker an Olympic sport. There’s a petition to sign and everything. Organizers characterize their number of backers “in the tens of thousands.”

Injustice, we have it all covered. The petition addresses those who doubt the validity of poker as a grueling sport. “Our athletes train like other athletes, save for a slightly higher intake of nicotine, whiskey and corndogs,” one paragraph says.

The Web site contains a story suggesting an Olympic torchbearer recently lost the torch in a poker game. You also will come across one of the most ominous headlines in recent memory: “Poker Players Agree to Wear Unitards.”

Injustice, how about that? If you doubted our dedication, there’s evidence, if your eyes can handle it. In the story about unitards, a pop-culture expert makes a stunning declaration: “Welcome to the age of the pear-shaped and the back-haired.”

Injustice, don’t bother us with silly questions. We’ll tell you exactly how poker is a sport. There’s physical exertion. Winning the World Series of Poker requires six consecutive days of playing poker 12-15 hours. There’s a 45-minute dinner break and 10-minute bathroom breaks every two hours. Plan wrong, and you’ll have to play mistake-free with a full bladder.

Injustice, you gained some supporters there. Even we must laugh a bit about this poker-athlete phenomenon. But that’s about as disjointed as we will become. We’re serious about our poker movement. You’ve held down poker too long.

“We’re trying to get poker out of the back rooms of local bars,” Bitar said.

We will not lose. Apparently, we love our poker that much.