Dallas ? Michael MacCambridge’s latest tome hit the bookstores recently. It is titled America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation. It is 576 pages thick.

Let me offer a shorter explanation:

The NBA is like a grungy bachelor seeking a makeover from the boys on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to retain an increasingly disaffected audience. The few people who know the NHL is on ice this season don’t care (except probably for former U.S. House Republican leader Dick Armey, from the red state of Texas, who championed hockey players for their virtuous living, the same hockey players, some of whom we now know hung out with a strip-club owning rock star proudly nicknamed after a $10 bag of marijuana.)

And then there is baseball. There is always baseball.

One would’ve thought that after the Red Sox won this year’s World Series, cleansing the franchise of a much-ballyhooed curse, all would go well with the one-time national pastime.

But then the national steroids scandal tripped up the game, all but netting it earlier this month when grand jury testimony linked sluggers Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds directly to questionable and possibly illegal supplements supplied by the now notorious Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative.

And Wednesday, major league baseball somehow bobbled, once again, its salvaging of the maligned Montreal franchise, which it told us with much drama just a few weeks ago, would result in the return of baseball to the nation’s capital for the first time in a generation and a half.

Against that backdrop that is the American pro sports scene, the NFL — even with its foibles, some of which have been felonious — couldn’t help but ascend to the top.

How baseball could blow the baseball deal in my hometown, Washington, D.C., is utterly amazing. The D.C. City Council is due much of the blame for pulling a last-minute switcheroo by placing a poison pill in the relocation agreement its mayor, Anthony Williams, struck with Bud Selig’s office. But baseball should’ve made absolutely sure the deal it announced with so much fanfare could not go up — with all due apologies to former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry — in smoke.

After all, Selig and the league’s owners had been looking for a new home for the Expos for at least two years. They pored over myriad proposals from many municipalities. They settled on metropolitan D.C. because its population had the deepest pockets.

Yet, the other day, baseball was stunned — stunned! — as the D.C. City Council snatched the rug from under its feet. It demanded, among other things, that the new owners provide half of the new stadium’s financing.

Baseball thought it had a deal for all of the money to be put up by public vehicles. All it had, apparently, was a gentleman’s agreement. D.C. City Council chair Linda Cropp proved to be no gentleman, or gentlewoman.

Cropp and the council were wrong. They should’ve honored the deal. (Then again, us Washingtonians weren’t surprised. Our town couldn’t cut a deal with the late Jack Kent Cooke to build a new football stadium, even though he agreed to pay for it.)

Baseball in Washington was a good deal for a city that struggles to levy tax revenue because so much property is government owned, and finds it difficult to generate jobs because it’s a white-collar town that manufactures little more than hot air.