We’re a forgiving people, just not a forgetful one.

There never will be a clean slate for Michael Vick, nor should there be. His apologists equate his release from federal prison this week to washing away the stains of his heinous transgressions. Punitive debt paid, he’s somehow owed the opportunity to continue his high life as it was before the Feds exposed his sordid sub-life.

Think again.

Vick doesn’t walk out of prison a football player. He leaves a convicted felon.

Vick has a right to make a living, but playing in the NFL remains a privilege. Vick has the right to prove that he has reformed, that he has grown intellectually and spiritually. But the NFL isn’t bound to provide him with that platform.

Reinstating Vick to the NFL upon completion of his two-month house arrest in July would be an ill-advised move for the league. Commissioner Roger Goodell should continue Vick’s suspension for another year.

If Vick truly appreciates all he has lost, he should prove it now that he’s out of jail. Let him spend another year as an average layman earning modest wages, trying to make monthly ends meet. Test his tenacity in maintaining his football conditioning while working a regular 9-to-5 job. Give him a taste of what second chances are for the rest of us who don’t run a 40 in 4.3 seconds or rifle a football 70 yards.

Perhaps the additional humility will wipe away the last vestige of celebrity entitlement, and Vick will emerge repentant.

His problem is that he always will be the Dog Murderer. Vick never will shake the loathsome portrait conveyed in the federal government’s case, which chronicled how he and his associates choked, hanged and electrocuted defenseless pit bulls because they weren’t mean enough to win dogfights.

The issue isn’t the value of a human life compared to an animal. The issue is criminal intent.

NFL linebacker Leonard Little got drunk following a birthday party, got behind the wheel of a car and tragically took the life of an innocent woman in another car in 1998. Little pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter. He served 90 days in jail and resumed his professional career.

Why, you ask, should Little get another chance in the NFL while Vick “only killed dogs”? But it wasn’t Little’s intention to take another life when he took the wheel that night, which is why you cannot look at Vick’s situation through Little’s legal prism.

You cannot escape the premeditated viciousness of Vick’s torturing and killing animals for a number of years under the guise of an underground business enterprise. It was no accident. It was a savagely calculated plan, and you cannot forget that. Ever.

But somehow the onus for turning the page rests predominantly on those still outraged over Vick’s deeds. They should just get over it, some argue. Let the man live his new life. Let him play NFL football.

But the latter two points are mutually exclusive.

If Vick and his cadre of sycophants still measure his self-worth strictly as a football player at the outset of his new life, then he has learned nothing from the past two years. There will be no remorse for his actions, only a perceived victim’s contempt for his persecutors.

Vick will have every opportunity to show that he’s a new person possessing a new moral compass, but that has nothing to do with his taking another NFL snap.