It’s been so long now, and so much more has happened, that it’s become almost impossible to recall what seeded whatever happened at Duke between its men’s lacrosse team and a woman who now accuses some on the team of gang raping her.

A month passed last week, if you can believe it, since a woman said she was raped at a house where much of the Duke lacrosse team resided. It’s been three weeks since the university announced it was suspending the team from play until everything was sorted out.

And woven through it are questions about what race and class have to do with it all. The accuser is a black mother of two working her way through historically black N.C. Central in part as a stripper, which was why she was at the lacrosse team’s house in the first place. The accused are all white men at Duke, where annual tuition is roughly twice the yearly income of the average family in its hometown of Durham, N.C.

All together it’s made for the perfect cover-up of how such a despicable thing could happen even at such a high-minded place as Duke.

For no matter the outcome of this case, the reason it came into existence at all is because Duke – just like other colleges, be they big or small or private or public – nurtured through eyes wide shut that sense of entitlement that is so dangerously rampant in locker rooms and clubhouses everywhere.

This is yet another installment of Athletes Gone Wild.

To be sure, last month wasn’t the first time that members of Duke’s lacrosse team found themselves in the crosshairs of local police. North Carolina newspapers discovered that almost one-third of the program’s players since 1999 – which would be 41 players, including about 15 on this year’s team – had been charged with myriad misdemeanors for rowdy behavior. Drunk driving. Urinating in public. Using an adult’s ID to buy beer while underage. Damaging property after arguing with a girlfriend.

Who didn’t do some of that in college, you ask? Isn’t that just boys being boys?

Diminish it however you want, but don’t overlook the fact that Duke enabled the escalation to where the Durham community now finds itself.

The school all but condoned the lacrosse team’s actions by not having attempted to stamp them out earlier. The team was going to NCAA title games. So, instead, Duke rewarded it. It entrusted a university-owned house off campus to the team, where it could throw all the crazy parties its players desired. Out of sight, out of mind. And you wonder where those Dallas Cowboys of the ’90s got the idea that a special house for partying was a good idea.

Why else do some athletes think laws of society are only for the rest of us? Duke didn’t start looking into the incident until a day after it was reported and said nothing to anyone about it. It let the team play two more games before deciding at first to forfeit a couple of upcoming matches and, eventually, call off the season.

It wasn’t even until earlier this month that the school confirmed to the Raleigh, N.C., News & Observer that there were frequent complaints to police about the behavior of the lacrosse team.

By not acting more swiftly than it did after these most reprehensible allegations surfaced, Duke only further emboldened so-called student-athletes, too many of whom already think that the second part of their title gives them a birthright to misbehave.

That isn’t true, of course. But if youth leagues and high schools aren’t teaching that, colleges should be.