Numbers don’t lie, it is said, but sometimes numbers don’t cooperate either.

This is especially true as we close out the current, still-nameless decade.

When the 10-year span starting with 2000 began, there was much consternation over what we would label the period, a convention that has become necessary for things like nostalgic miniseries titles and radio flashback weekends.

The Zips? The Zilches? The Naughts? The Aughts?

The Double-Os? The 2000s?

All of them had flaws and none, as the decades closes, has stuck. Along with companies that issue retrospective CD compilations, I’ve been pondering this dilemma, talking to some people about it, wracking my brain to try to come up with a solution.

Then, suddenly, in bed one morning, it hit me: We don’t need to name this decade because, the minute it is over, at 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2010, we are going to pretend it never happened.

We will put it in a box. We will wrap duct tape around the box. We will drop the box in cement and then, after the cement hardens, into the Chicago River. And we will never mention its contents again.

Think about it. Has there been a lousier 10 years in American history? OK, the Civil War, granted. And the Great Depression wasn’t so hot, either, the pictures suggest. But this one has been close enough to an all-time bad to merit the kind of willful amnesia that I’m proposing.

There was Sept. 11, which we were told to fight not by pitching in and making sacrifices, but by taking on more debt to buy gas-guzzlers. Then came Iraq and a new operational definition for “quagmire.”

We had eight years of a leader who does not seem likely to wind up on the Top 42 Presidents List. Global warming and its doofus deniers. Shortsighted economic rapaciousness leading to an unprecedented global meltdown.

Now we’re facing a national future more precariously mortgaged than any sub-prime borrower could dream of; our national house has about 17 more bathrooms than we can afford, and the repo man is driving the block, trying to find our address.

Even the smaller stuff has been worth forgetting. Pick a handful. “The Apprentice” positing, and us accepting, Donald Trump as some sort of business whiz. James Frey, “writer.” BK Burger Shots, “food.” An American love affair with hybrid cars for four whole months, until gas got cheap again.

I’m even going to add a personal note and toss the rapid decline of the newspaper industry in there, partly because, for a while at least, it’s going to be a lot harder to be a good citizen, mostly because it highlights the fact that very few of us seem to care about being good citizens.

The case is clear. This dog of a decade belongs, along with my prom night and those seven years I owned a Peugeot, on the temporal blacklist.

We can’t call the whole thing off, because that would be to deny science. But we can try to forget. Put our collective fingers in our collective ears and give voice, with our collective tongues, to the phrase, “Na na na na, na na na na.”

There are people who disagree. Frank Deford, the sportswriter and NPR commentator, proposed that we call the decade “The Loveys,” inspired by the archaic scorekeeping in tennis.

Scott Pedersen, an electrician at Cornell University, has gambled $15,000 on us settling on either the “Naughties,” the “Aughties,” or the “Naughty Aughties.”

Contemplating what we’ll call The Radio Station Problem, he’s spent that cash to actually trademark the names.

“Just numerically, mnemonically you really want something that has ‘-ties,”‘ he says. “‘Now playing music from the Nineties, the First Decade of the New Millennium and Today’? You’re not going to be on the radio saying that.”

Irving Rein, a communications professor at Northwestern, acknowledges that “it’s a tough one,” then suggests “The Buster Decade.” “We had this big boom and now we’re bust,” he says.

Maybe. And maybe some other name will emerge in time, when it’s not all so fresh and painful. For now, I’m reminded of how my older son, when he was just a toddler, used to say “none-zero,” either for emphasis or because he thought it was the correct term for “nothing.”

We have been living through the Nonezeroes, and I’ll thank you not to mention them again.

Bring on the Teens or, um, the Tweens. Or the Tennies. Whoops. You can see where this is leading.