So now this avalanche finally falls on the weary head of one Dwyane Wade — all this doubt and wrath and even, for the very first time, name-calling. Wade has had to wallow in that sewage for a couple of days now, after his worst moments ever in a Miami Heat uniform. In other words, Wade has spent the weekend feeling the way LeBron James has for much of the past two years. It really is the first time Wade’s golden name has ever been stained in Miami.

The heart sobs, and the head can’t soothe. So many questions, no good answers. Did football do this to Junior Seau? How much pain must you be in for the <span class="italic">cure</span> to be shooting yourself in the chest? A mother wails with the worst ache a human can feel, and three confused children are left to wonder why Daddy didn’t want to live, and two decades worth of NFL teammates ask how their fun-loving friend could choose a coffin.

Heat coach Erik Spoelstra uses the word “trust” a lot. In timeout huddles. In sideline interviews. After games. Trust. Trust. Trust. He has a handful of words he overuses — “identity,” “toughness,” “grind” — but none gets worn out quite like “trust” as he implores his men, again and again, to have faith in one another. This as he continues to fiddle with his rotation two years in, and keeps yo-yoing his starting centers, and even changes the offensive style of his team after visiting, of all people, a college football coach — only to abandon that during a truncated schedule that was little more than an exercise in experimenting. Hard to argue that any of the above conveys a great deal of, um, trust.

This was after the kill, after a piece-by-piece ravaging of the New York Knicks that felt like wolves licking clean the meat off a zebra’s bones. All the other Heat players were back in the locker room in various states of undress, meeting the media in front of their lockers, but LeBron James was summoned to the big room filled with all the cameras, the only Heat player invited here to give his team a voice.

The contaminated Dolphins pushed general manager Jeff Ireland out into the open last week, feeding him to the hungry and howling media beast. Question after question, on radio station after radio station, morning after night, the media-shy Ireland was forced to either a) defend himself or b) talk about why he is one of the most unpopular figures in the history of South Florida sports.

As a media helicopter chop-chop-chopped over the new ballpark, and angry protestors gathered outside, and a shamed baseball manager cried while meeting the ladies who dress in white to remember jailed Cuban dissidents, something was lost in the sea of scandalous noise last week. Namely, that even Miami’s passionate Cuban community was divided about what the appropriate, proportional punishment for Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen should be for his pro-Fidel Castro comments. And that the division was, by and large, generational.

It really has been fascinating to watch the flames climb on this New Orleans Saints story, the emperor of a very violent business feeding a howling and eager media one crumb at a time, keeping this dirty story in front of the eyes of his customers for more than a month now. You remember how NFL commissioner Roger Goodell became famous, right? For unprecedented penalties against players who dared to bring bad publicity for extended periods upon the league’s shield. That’s what he calls it, the shield. He did not want arrests and negativity in front of his paying customers in the news cycle, staining his shield, so he’d come down on misbehavior from repeat offenders with a punitive fury previously unseen in major American sports.

When did you find your voice?

The future of the Dolphins now rests on a question that is unscientific and hard to untangle:

Here is where Team Purgatory finds itself today:

As the Heat’s vision of success comes to fruition, Chris Bosh doesn’t have the time to enjoy the winning. ‘Can’t breathe yet, though. Can’t breathe until it is over, and we’re holding the trophy.’