One of the things that is still nagging at us more than a day after the Boston Herald admitted to one of the biggest blunders in the history of sports journalism is whether the powers-that-be at the Herald did so on their own, or with the business end of a bayonet-tipped muzzle-loader tapping against their temples.

The timeline immediately caught our attention. Late Tuesday night, the Herald issued an apology on its web site, which then adorned the front page of the Wednesday fish wrap. Later in the day, owner Bob Kraft declared victory.

Our guess? The Patriots’ lawyers and the lawyers for the Herald spent most of Tuesday afternoon communicating by e-mail and/or (Sprint) phone, in an effort to come up with a procedure for promptly retracting the February 2 story alleging cheating at the highest levels of pro sports, based on Matt Walsh’s Tuesday morning explanation to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell that Walsh knows of no videotape of the Rams’ walk-through practice prior to Super Bowl XXXVI. In exchange for the retraction, we believe that the Pats promised not to launch a legal firestorm that could have resulted ultimately in the renaming of the publication as the Foxborough Herald.

If that’s what happened, it makes sense. No one gains anything from prolonging this sad episode. Besides, as Roger Clemens has learned, a defamation lawsuit opens every closet in the house as part of the search for skeletons.

Also, the ultimate assessment of any legal damages suffered by the franchise would have been driven by comparing the harm from the false story of one-time Super Bowl cheating to the harm the team did to its own public image via chronic non-Super Bowl cheating. Thus, the Patriots wouldn’t be able to move forward on Spygate I, if they chose to pursue legal action over what the Herald erroneously convinced many would be Spygate II.

But if there was some type of a deal between the Pats and the Herald, the settlement apparently doesn’t extend to the corps of columnists at the newspaper. In Thursday’s edition, Tony Massarotti describes the public discourse on the red, white, and blue team as, in essence, a red state/blue state conundrum, with a certain segment of the media and the public staunchly pro-Pats, and the rest lined up firmly against the team.

Basically, Massarotti implies that anyone in the media who does anything other than criticize the Patriots is somehow in bed with them (or, at a minimum, sleeping on officially-licensed team sheets and pillow covers). And that’s just crazy, in our view. Plenty of writers and broadcasters have written good things and bad things about the Patriots since Spygate first hit the fan. And there are, indeed, plenty of bad things and good things to write.

Actually, Massarotti’s column speaks to a deeper problem in our society — a problem to which we heard Peter King allude Wednesday morning on Sirius NFL Radio. Basically, many of us cling blindly to our positions on issues of sports and politics, forming an opinion based on an initial impression, guarding it like a newborn cub, and refusing to entertain any and all evidence that might later show that our initial impression was wrong.

So here’s the reality on this long, drawn out mess, in summary fashion. Good and bad.

The Patriots cheated, for years.

The Pats continued to cheat even after they knew that the league was onto them.

The NFL imposed a stiff punishment for the cheating.

The NFL destroyed the evidence that the Patriots turned over regarding cheating, making it impossible for anyone to know the extent of the Pats’ cheating.

Other teams have cheated, and continue to cheat.

The media generally has failed in its responsibility to develop and to present evidence of other teams cheating.

Some segments of the media instead have focused on trying to develop and to present more evidence of the Patriots cheating.

Meanwhile, the Patriots authored (without cheating) one of the greatest seasons in the history of organized sports.

Senator Arlen Specter, possibly motivated by the lingering dispute between the NFL and a major cable company headquartered within Specter’s jurisdiction, publicly stuck his nose into the matter.

Simultaneously, the race among the “real” journalists to publish the long-rumored story of Super Bowl skullduggery resulted in the Herald rushing to print a story that turned out to be flat-out false.

For the Pats, the timing couldn’t have been worse; the article came out the day before a Super Bowl game that the team would go on to lose.

Though it’s impossible to know whether the Pats would have won Super Bowl XLII if the franchise hadn’t been forced to deal with this tremendous (and, as we now know, unwarranted) distraction only one day before the game, no one can credibly contend that the story had no impact on the preparations and the planning for the game.

And so the Patriots are both villain and victim. Massarotti’s notion that the public and the media can see the Pats as only one or the other is juvenile, and wrong.

It doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been media bias both for and against the Patriots. But not everyone who follows the NFL for a full or partial living is out to prove that the Patriots are good, or that the Patriots are bad. For some of us, it’s about getting to the truth, and about acknowledging all sides of one of the most complex and polarizing stories that sports has ever seen. If the Herald had been willing to do the same, the February 2 story might never have been published.