Ever get the feeling that David Copperfield and David Blaine have infiltrated our sports pages?

Everything appears to be a grand illusion.

The cliche says that records were made to be broken. The new world order suggests that records were made so conniving cheats and technological whiz kids can find a way to break into hallowed halls of fame.

The swimming world championships in Rome ended Sunday after competitors set 43 world records. Consider that only 15 were set at the worlds in 2007. It’s such a cheap thrill, why not hand out lollipops instead of gold medals?

We’re all being taken for suckers anyway, thanks to new swimsuits that allow aerodynamic technology to trump old-fashioned training. Is it only coincidence that over the past two years the world record at every distance between 50 and 800 meters — men’s and women’s — has been broken?

Some competitors claim that blood-doping remains prevalent in cycling. Tour de Farce anybody?

Over on our baseball fields, Boston Red Sox strongman David Ortiz was outed as another liar digesting much more than an extra bowl of Wheaties to gather strength.

Steroids. Yawn. I’m beyond indignation and well into “just don’t care,” but a greater point of relevance remains.

How many sports these days involve The Big Con?

There’s a pharmaceutical treasure chest of goodies for athletes to ingest, and all sorts of funky technology in the game-day closet that can affect the final score. All an athlete has to do is pick and choose.

It’s an old-school rant, I know. Ethics can’t compete with money, ego, influence and fame. Who is going to be the next athlete to turn in a sample of rainbow-colored urine?

It’s going to be up to you to decide whether “asterisk” will be the sports word of the day for generations to come.

Most of the parade of cheats in baseball technically didn’t break any rules: Baseball didn’t impose a mandatory random-testing program, with penalties, until 2004. Such naive “policing” led to the big-bang ‘roid surge of Sammy Sosa, Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds and others.

Funny, but nobody has used the flimsy testing program — “Hey, there were no penalties!” — as an excuse. Why? Because it’s lame. It was wrong ethically, and they knew it.

Our stars of swimming don’t have the same ethical dilemma.

It’s not about the shoes, it’s about the suits.

First came the Speedo LZR Racer last year. It’s been trumped by the Arena X-Glide suit, which is 100 percent polyurethane. Some old-timers are wishing all of these suits — perfectly legal — would simply go to a watery grave.

“Basically, it’s technical doping,” said Janet Evans, a five-time Olympic medalist.

The good news is that FINA, the sport’s governing body, will ban all hi-tech swimsuits on Jan. 1. The bad: All the records will stand, raising suspicions that may linger forever:

Is it the swimmer, or the suit?

I’ll give Serbia’s Milorad Cavic props for this:

He has the best solution to this convoluted mess.

“It’s actually a dream of mine, to have … everybody swimming in briefs,” he said. “I swear to God, this is it, this is what I want, but this is the most unrealistic of all scenarios.”

But we can dream, can’t we?