On Friday, April 22, two months after his positive test, Colabello got a phone call saying his appeal had been denied. He was suspended for 80 games, beginning immediately. He asked his teammates to gather in the Blue Jays clubhouse at 3:30 that afternoon.

Many of them knew what Colabello had been going through; some did not. But almost all of them knew something strange had been going on over the past month, because the Blue Jays first baseman simply hadn’t been himself. He’d been quiet, distant and moody, while struggling to a 2-for-29 start. Colabello stood up in front of his teammates at 3:31 pm and immediately began to cry.

“It’s hard to stand in front of a room of guys like that. They’re your brothers,” Colabello says. “I can’t imagine being in their shoes. I can’t imagine having to be on the other side of that and not knowing what to say, not knowing what to do to help somebody, knowing that there isn’t anything you can do.”

Colabello spoke for ten minutes, telling his teammates everything that had already happened, and what might happen next. He told them he was going away for a while, and that he wished them the best of luck while he was gone. Over and over again, he told them to be careful.

“I said I wish I could stand here and tell you what to do differently or what to watch out for, but I don’t have that answer right now,” Colabello says. “And that’s why I’m so committed to the idea of figuring it out. Because this is bigger than me. It’s bigger than any of the other guys going through it. I told them, ‘I need to find an answer, guys. Until then, just please—if this can happen to me, this can happen to anybody.’”

Throughout this interview, Colabello frequently said he has no incentive to lie, because he’s already lost his appeal and begun serving his suspension. He said he’s seen how others who have been caught doping have handled the fallout, and that he believes the best method is to own up to one’s actions.

“It would be so awesome for me if I could stand here in front of you and tell you that I did this,” Colabello says. “I know how the world works. I know how things are. I’m not naive or stupid. I’ve seen the way this has played out. Guys have done this stuff in the past, they’ve come out and said ‘I’m really sorry guys, I didn’t mean to’ or ‘I made a mistake.’ And then people move on. They wipe their hands of it and they forgive people. But I can’t stand in front of a camera and apologize.”

Still, those DHCMT metabolites were in his urine, and he can’t deny that. According to the test—which was required to be specific and reproducible, and to have no false positives—at some point over the last several months, Colabello had an anabolic steroid in his system.

MLB does have an out clause. If Colabello can produce something he took that was contaminated with DHCMT and led to his positive test, he can bring it to the league. If he can’t, he’ll be eligible to return to the Blue Jays on July 23. Until one of those things happens, Colabello says he’ll continue searching.

“I won’t rest until the day I figure out how this happened,” Colabello says. “The damage has already been done to me emotionally and mentally. I’m never going to get that back. I just need to figure out why. Figure out where it came from. And then go from there.”