One of the myths that grew up around baseball in the tumultuous ’60s was that the commissioner branded Roger Maris with an asterisk for breaking Babe Ruth’s season home run record.

In truth, it was only a suggestion. Never official. Except in a movie title, that is.

But if he wants to save baseball, the current commissioner needs to resurrect the idea of an asterisk, and Bud Selig needs to leave a mark this time.

On a week when pitchers and catchers report and thoughts turn to the sweet, sentimental sounds of a ball on bat or glove, fans have been robbed of their nostalgia. And that’s about all they had left.

The mushroom cloud of steroids has now boiled up and blacked out a veritable Mount Rushmore of baseball stars from this era. First, it was Barry Bonds, then Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens and now A-Rod, who admits he did wrong even though he’s not sure exactly what he did. But whatever it was, he swears he didn’t do it before Texas and not at all since he left. No wonder Tom Hicks is so mad at him. A-Roid makes his Arlington years sound like he escaped from The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Anyway, the Rangers get a black eye, baseball gets a black eye and fans are afraid to look anymore.

The commissioner must act. He can’t pander to the union’s protests that A-Rod’s test and others were confidential. Or that he tested positive before Major League Baseball began issuing penalties for such results.

If A-Rod really thought steroids weren’t cheating, why did he wake up one morning vowing never to do it again?

Baseball officials are just about as culpable. They knew what was going on and did little except profit from it.

But that’s all old news. Time to move on. And what better way than to look into baseball’s past?

For better or worse, no sport reveres its history as much as baseball. Records mean something. Any football fan can tell you that Emmitt Smith is the NFL’s all-time leading rusher, but not many can cite his total of 18,355 yards.

Maybe you knew Kareem Abdul-Jabbar holds the NBA’s all-time scoring record with 38,387 points. But did you know Karl Malone ranks second, ahead of Michael Jordan?

And in hockey, there’s Wayne Gretzky and then?

Any second-rate baseball fan could tell you that Hank Aaron’s 755 home runs topped Babe Ruth’s 714. Or that Ruth’s 60 home runs stood as the benchmark until Maris hit 61 in 1961.

In July of that ’61 season, the commissioner, Ford Frick, an old sports writer who once penned stories for Ruth, called a news conference to talk about the home run chase. He said that if Ruth’s record were broken in 154 games, it would stand alone. But if it were broken after his self-imposed deadline in the expanded schedule of 162 games, “there would have to be some distinctive mark in the record books.”

If Maris did nothing to deserve his treatment, baseball’s generation of confirmed steroid abusers merit that much and more.

Bottom line: Stamping asterisks on all those implicated by more than mere rumor would restore baseball’s most cherished records, allow players to continue to work and provide some much-needed relief for beleaguered fans. Baseball could do worse for itself, and usually does.