Just when you think you've seen the bottom of the barrel, they go a little lower. When you think you know how far Nike will stoop, when you think you've seen the greedy heart of Tiger Woods at its worst, you learn that you hadn't even begun to grasp what they're about.

For sheer, unbridled cynicism, I don't think we've ever seen the like of the Nike spot using the voice of Tiger's dead father to (1) polish the golfer's tarnished image and (2) sell everything Nike.

If this one isn't a 10 on your nausea meter, you've been so brainwashed that you should get a job as a lab rat and let them test future marketing ploys on you, because they obviously work.

At least once a week, someone writes (usually with several obscenities and a couple of dozen spelling mistakes) to tell me I'm cynical. I prefer to think that I'm a romantic turned realist.

It's a common fate in the world of journalism. Most sportswriters start out, as I did, loving the game. Or games. We grew up idolizing Hank Aaron and Muhammad Ali, or Rocket Richard, Gordie Howe, Jean Béliveau and Bobby Orr.

Then we start covering sports in the era of the multi-national sponsor and the steroid cheat and we become disappointed realists. We aren't cynics, because if we were really cynical, we would have gone into marketing, advertising or public relations.

Today, the realists in the world of sports media are a vanishing breed, our places taken by the cheerleaders of the new media, journalists in name only, who see themselves as extensions of the marketing and PR departments of the organizations we cover.

When the news of Woods and his chronic philandering first broke, it was hardly surprising to the realists of the sports world that Nike would stay with him.

Please see Todd, Page B7

Nike has been there from the beginning, the first to lay down a big-time bet that a golfer (a golfer!) could become the next big marketing thing after Michael Jordan.

Nike was right a second time when the company bet that no matter how many mistresses come forward, people would go right on buying Tiger Woods gear. All you had to do was listen to the lab rats cheering every Tiger swing at the Masters to know that nothing will ever change.

If anything, the numbers will go up, because there is no such thing as bad publicity. For the lab rats who like to think of themselves as independent-thinking guys, driving their SUVs while wearing Tiger baseball caps (with the sunglasses up on the bill, of course) and Tiger red shirts with a set of Tiger clubs in the back, there was no behaviour so repugnant it would turn them off.

From the beginning of this scandal, it wasn't the philandering that bothered me. (That was no surprise to anyone who has covered pro athletes for even a few years.) It was the astonishing hypocrisy of a man who had used his photogenic wife and children to help push the image of the perfect husband and the perfect father he chose to cultivate. An image as far from the truth as it is possible to be.

Still, we thought there was a limit. That there was a commercial somewhere so tasteless, so repugnant, so ghoulish that even Tiger wouldn't approve it. We were wrong. A man who will use his dead father to set himself up to earn another billion will stoop to anything.

It turns out that I was still an idealist, even when it concerned the world's most hypocritical athlete. I believed that the one thing for which Tiger Woods still possessed a degree of respect was his father's memory. I was wrong.

SSS

Meanwhile, back at the ranch - your Montreal Canadiens slip into the playoffs by losing the last game of the season, at home, to the second-worst team in the National Hockey League. "Winning" a playoff spot thanks to the absurd NHL practice of awarding a point to a team that loses in overtime.

Pardon us if we're not impressed. Something to do with that Carolina game last Thursday night, perhaps, when a team with a postseason berth on the line laid an egg that could hatch a Tyrannosaurus.

You want to talk about giveaways? "Here's your puck, Mr. Staal. Have a nice time with it, and give Mr. Halak our regards."

Surely we have seen worse performances in critical situations. We simply can't remember when.

Look for the silver lining here and all you find is the bottom line: Not good enough. A team that finished with 88 points on the season. Ditch the silly points-for-losers system and the Canadiens finished the season a thoroughly mediocre 39-43. A playoff team in name only. A squad that looked pretty good for a couple of weeks after the Olympics faded down the stretch like an old pair of jeans.

Yes, we know about the early season injuries - but the Canadiens had all their best players in uniform down the stretch and they couldn't get it done. Couldn't score, couldn't defend.

What happens now? The Canadiens get steamrolled by the Washington Capitals. There are only two possible scenarios here: Jaroslav Halak is very hot, in which case the Habs might take this first-round series as far as six games. Or Halak is merely ordinary, as he was Saturday night, in which case it's a repeat of last spring's four-and-out.

Chances the Canadiens will beat Alex Ovechkin's Caps to advance to the second round? Roughly equal to the possibility that you'll see me flinging Penelope Cruz around on Dancing With the Stars.

Translation? Won't happen.

Next season? Given Scott Gomez's contract and all the other problems with which Pierre Gauthier was saddled by the departed Bob Gainey,

it will be more of the same, as a 17-year stretch without an appearance in the third round of the playoffs stretches toward infinity.

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