In discussing the difference between a star and a hero, a football Sunday is a pretty good place to start. The NFL uses the violence of its game to lionize the participants in a way that baseball, basketball and hockey cannot match.

The NFL is packaged and sold with theme music that sounds borrowed from an old Napoleonic march. Its players are cast as warriors, its coaches as generals. John Facenda’s voice-of-God tone wouldn’t have worked half as well anywhere else.

But last week in football and in sports was a bad one for those who can’t distinguish athletic victory from social virtue, and a good one for those trying to teach kids that a three-touchdown day in the sun and a 100-mph fastball out of the pen do not a heroic man make.

Today Major League Baseball is celebrating a World Series full of fresh faces, and yet the headlines all week revolved around the flaws of big-name, big-game athletes who forever are held up as flawless figures with god-like traits.

Plaxico Burress, Super Bowl hero (that word again), cursed at his coach during the second game back from a suspension for refusing to show for work and was fined another $45,000 by the NFL for berating and criticizing officials and for heaving a ball into the crowd.

Brett Favre, Hall of Fame-to-be quarterback, leaked inside information to an opponent of his former team, the Packers, as a way of hurting a franchise only planning to build a statue in his image.

Joba Chamberlain, fireballing Yankee as popular as they come, found himself arrested in his home state of Nebraska on charges of driving under the influence after leaving a strip joint.

Deuce McAllister, star running back, reportedly landed on a list of eight NFL players who tested positive for banned substances under the league’s drug policy, a list that doesn’t include Steelers receiver Santonio Holmes, who was hit with a misdemeanor marijuana charge.

And to punctuate the week that was, Isiah Thomas, best little player in NBA history, was rushed to the hospital after an overdose on sleeping pills before telling The New York Post that his teenage daughter was actually the one in the ambulance – a claim his local police chief likened to a Nixonian cover-up to The Associated Press.

Yes, Thomas already had defaced his basketball legacy by running the Knicks into the ground. But if it’s true that Thomas fed his own child to the public wolves as a way of salvaging whatever’s left of his reputation, well, even Pacman Jones would have a major problem with that.

All in all, fame and fortune conspire to give athletes a warped belief that they can do whatever they want, whenever they want to do it. This culture of entitlement can inspire quarterbacks and pitchers and point guards to ignore the principles of common decency and the everyday laws of the land.

It’s a societal problem with roots in the pee-wee leagues, where adults start making exceptions for the strongest and the fastest. Kids learn early that life gets easier when you can get into the end zone on fourth-and-goal.

Heroes are out there, all around us in the public and private sectors. But a professional ballfield or court isn’t the best place to look for them.