As the “Rocky Mountain News”, 55 days before its 150th birthday, got out its very final edition and as its 220 or so newsroom workers braced themselves for unemployment, at just about that very moment, Albert Haynesworth signed a $100 million contract with the Washington Redskins. And just as unemployment in California reportedly reached 10.1 percent, Manny Ramirez signed a two-year deal with the Dodgers for $45 million.

Jobless on one hand; fabulously wealthy on the other: The contrasts are stark. Although the signings of professional athletes to multi-million-dollar contracts and the layoffs of so many workers seem unrelated, taken together they could help explain, or redefine, the changing relationship between sports and their fans. More and more, it seems, this relationship is characterized by animosity.

As Rick Morrissey of the Chicago Tribune put it, “Watching athletes mess up has become part of the enjoyment of sports.” And, of course, the joy increases with the size of the athlete’s bankroll and reputation, just as the animosity grows with the depth of the recession.

During the Great Depression — or Greater Depression, as it soon could be known — sports became a “civic religion,” explained Steve Walk, the chairman of the Department of Kinesiology and an expert in sport sociology at Cal State Fullerton. Sports reassured people, he said, that American culture and society weren’t completely falling apart.

Lou Gehrig, James Braddock and Sammy Baugh inspired with their examples of perseverance and athletic virtuosity. Seabiscuit, the diminutive racehorse who became one of the era’s most popular sports stars, made determination vivid with his victory in the Santa Anita Handicap.

“But I don’t see that sports today will play the same role,” Walk said, explaining that fans are “conflicted,” excoriating the very sports heroes they’ve created. Fans are willing to admire prominent sports figures, but at the same time they’re resentful, especially during these financial difficulties, of the stars’ extravagant salaries.

If anything, sports today convince people that American culture and society actually might be falling apart. And if not American culture, then at least the American League. When in the course of two weeks the New York Yankees sign three players — CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Mark Teixeira — to contracts worth $423 million, the cumulative impact can only be an obscene and contemptuous affront to average, hard-working folks whose jobs might be fragile.

After Alex Rodriguez admitted that he used steroids from 2001-03 and that he, along with 103 others, indeed tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, the highest-paid player in baseball fell thunderously, landing in a vortex of denunciation. In a mostly predictable and somewhat gleeful spate of name-calling headlines, Rodriguez became “A-Fraud,” and “A-Roid,” and, well, something worse.

He was described as a “disgraceful scoundrel” and connected, of course, to an imaginary “Hall of Shame,” all of which might seem an adolescent over-the-top reaction to behavior that didn’t break any rules at the time or hurt anybody. But when professional athletes make millions and millions of dollars amid economic turmoil, sports invite such reactions.