Nobody affiliated with the Florida Marlins has given more to baseball or loves the game more than Andre Dawson, the team’s special assistant who, with a little bit of logic or luck, will be in the Hall of Fame someday.

You stop Dawson as he moves through the team’s clubhouse because you are curious what he thinks. He played 21 big-league seasons. Hit 438 homers.

You are asking him about Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron’s record.

Nobody enjoys this topic. It’s almost as if the biggest story in baseball, in all of sports this spring-into-summer, is the one better left unsaid.

How will he feel when Bonds, now 10 back, passes Aaron’s 755 homers?

Dawson seems pained by what he is about to say. This is his family we’re talking about. This is baseball.

“It’s tainted, without a doubt,” Dawson said of the record Bonds soon will claim. “It has played a major issue in his performance. It hasn’t been documented, but as a player, you see it.”

It. Steroids, of course.

“I played with him and saw his talent right away. But I never would have imagined him producing the power numbers he did,” added Dawson, 52, once of Miami Southwest High. “Breaking the record would be good for the game, but instead it’s bad in the sense of the cloud. The public doesn’t think of him as being the right guy.”

The record almost certainly will fall before the All-Star break hosted by Bonds’ San Francisco Giants in July. Surely, barring injury, Bonds will be the record-holder when the Giants visit Dolphins Stadium on Aug. 17-20, when the reaction to him likely will be volatile, and mixed – and understandably.

Imagine if there was the feeling the most hallowed record in all of American sports was owned, but not earned. No need to imagine. It is happening.

The anticipation of the record changing hands is undercut by a sense of dread. America isn’t so much excited as divided, and baseball isn’t sure if it should force itself to fake a celebration. Bonds moves in on history like a storm cloud, and none of us seems real sure what to do.

It might be a travesty, an embarrassment to the sport.

It might be that the shame is the vilification of Bonds.

It is, in either case, well – awkward.

Root unabashedly for Bonds to pass Aaron and it is as if you are being naive to the obvious steroid matter or simply dismissing it (tacitly condoning it) as no big deal.

Root openly against Bonds, in the face of his denials, and you might be guilty of convicting an innocent man. Heck, you might even be racist, based on polls indicating a black/white chasm and the rote, dime-store sociology that follows.

A new ABC News-ESPN poll found only 37 percent of Americans are rooting for Bonds to surpass Aaron, breaking down to 74 percent support from blacks but only 28 percent from whites.

To Dawson, who is black, the issue is right/wrong, not black/white. We would agree, and note that white Mark McGwire, otherwise a first-ballot Hall of Famer, was rebuffed overwhelmingly by a mostly white electorate in his first bid for Cooperstown on account of the same cloud regarding performance-enhancing drugs. Sammy Sosa might suffer the same fate. Even Bonds might, at least initially, despite the record.

“A really delicate issue,” Dawson said of those three’s Cooperstown future. “Their status is pretty suspect.”