San Jose, Calif. ? Thanks to Jose Canseco, I can finally predict an end date for this lurid era of steroid accusation, deceit, deliberation and confirmation.

Here it is: January 2007. It’s only two years away, although it will feel like 200.

That’s when Mark McGwire, Canseco’s former teammate and bete noire, will make his first appearance on the Hall of Fame ballot, and when Barry Bonds could well be in his first off-season of retirement.

That’s when all of this furor will have either blown over (easy election for McGwire, nobody bothers Bonds) or will have taken the reputations of both men into the gutter, or worse.

That’s when the Bay Area will no longer be the dazed epicenter of the Steroid Era, though the shakes and quakes will keep coming until then.

McGwire and Bonds. Two very different men with very different reputations whose bodies might have been shaped by very similar chemical compounds.

McGwire and Bonds. The owners of the two most storied, most chronicled home run seasons in baseball history.

McGwire and Bonds. Cleared (or forgiven) together by January 2007, or tainted together forever.

Now, of course, Canseco is a thoroughly untrustworthy witness; nobody wants to marginalize McGwire’s accomplishments solely on the word of an attention-seeking clown.

Canseco has a new book, and the New York Daily News has described portions in which Canseco claims that he shot steroids into McGwire while both were A’s and that McGwire and Jason Giambi also were users.

A huge and reckless personal betrayal? Yes.

But, like most snitches, Canseco was in a position to see things non-clowns were not. He used steroids. He was a senior “Bash Brother” alongside McGwire. He has reason to talk (money, bitterness) but not to lie (hello, libel lawsuit!). Really, are the government’s first-hand sources in the BALCO-Bonds investigation much different than Canseco?

How many willing and credible sources have first-hand knowledge of steroid abuse in pro sports? Ken Caminiti is dead. Almost everybody else isn’t talking. Victor Conte and Canseco seem to be about it.

And that’s why Canseco’s accusations are almost as important as Bonds’ reported admission to a grand jury that he may have inadvertently taken a designer steroid.

By January 2007, we will know the big-picture answers. We’ll know outcome of the Balco prosecutions, and we will see what baseball looks like with a tough steroid policy. We’ll better understand McGwire’s achievements.

We’ll see if he gets a first-ballot trip to Cooperstown or if he is denied in the first wave of steroid revulsion. And we’ll see what baseball feels like without Barry Bonds, assuming he retires after the 2006 season, which seems to grow more likely with each new knee surgery.

Now, we can see the end. And no matter what, McGwire and Bonds are in this thing together.

For all of his cloddishness, Canseco has given us a Steroid Era framework: A bold beginning (the Bash Brothers), the awkward middle acts (now) and the long-anticipated climax, due by January 2007, if you can wait that long.