It’s increasingly tough, some say impossible, to pick and adore a sports hero for fear some of his or her misfeasances, malfeasances and nonfeasances will rise up and bite you down the line.

Maybe there never were any saints in athletics, but if such ever existed, there are a lot fewer now than there used to be.

You see, hear about and read about somebody who seems to be stellar and sterile of any degree of criminality or aberrance. Then you get rocked by bad behavior that leaves the “hero” far short of genuine role-model caliber.

It’s difficult enough for mature and society-wise adults to clamber onto some jock’s bandwagon without fear of being forced to jump off when a buffalo chip or two hits the fan of bad behavior. But pity the poor kids who see somebody of note that they admire and who wind up watching a Michael Vick or his ilk carted off to prison. Youngsters are supposed to be exposed as much as possible to examples of things you should aspire to, as people like Bill Cosby stress. The young fry will get vaccinated soon enough by harsh reality.

No sooner do a lot of today’s kids get excited about and enthralled by a celebrity than Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and others in baseball’s arm and hammer clan are caught up in a web of apparent chemical enhancement of a drastic, and illegal, nature.

It transcends the gender gap. Track star Marion Jones won Olympic medals galore, en route to horrible embarrassment for juicing up. The fact she got stripped of her medals and did time in prison indicates rather strongly it was more than just an allegation. Please, lord of sports, don’t let 41-year-old Dara Torres of recent Olympic swimming fame get snarled in some kind of booster folderol. Role model? If she’s legit, she’s fantastic, like little Joanie Benoit who won the first women’s Olympic marathon in 1984.

Aware she’d be suspect, Torres mandated all kinds of special tests to assure she was clean and sober. I hope she’s as good as she appears, mainly for the people, young and old, who have been inspired and would be crushed if she’s found to be some kind of junkie.

But there’s no fail-safe selection mode anymore for people who desperately want and need legitimate heroes and heroines with minimal taint. The local guys who most deserve a kick in the rear are basketballers Darrell Arthur and Mario Chalmers, who got embroiled in that ridiculous pot and harpie combo at a TRAINING CAMP on how to behave as a pro. Tom Keegan brilliantly barbed them with “Cheech and Chalmers.” Consider them lead actors for the next film version of “Dumb and Dumber.” Add damn fools.

Kids and adults alike idolized these two in their recent national championship run at Kansas. The way they let down those fans was disgusting, besmirching KU in the process. They were iffy draft picks to begin with, lucked into decent contracts, then marginalized their careers with that hotel room fiasco.

To me the best aftermath was that there was no silly flood of public sentiment in their favor, the old “boys will be boys” nuttiness. People felt terribly disenchanted, unsympathetic and looked for new heroes.

They seem to be getting scarcer all the time.