Some drug test failures are shocking. This one just feels depressing.

It feels like a bummer. That was the first thought I had when I learned that Antonio Silva had tested positive for elevated testosterone levels after his incredible fight with Mark Hunt earlier this month at UFC Fight Night 33. What a bummer.

Here we had a fight of the year candidate, maybe the best heavyweight fight in UFC history, and now it’s got this strange aftertaste to it. This… what? We haven’t decided yet. We will, though.

Whether you think it’s a big deal or you think it’s a non-deal, the point is now you have to think about it. You can’t just enjoy the fight for what it was without first making a decision about the extent to which it matters to you, personally, that one of the participants had more than the allowable amount of synthetic testosterone in his system at the time.

Maybe you’ll decide you don’t care. I could see how you might. “Bigfoot,” after all, does have some medical history he can point to. Maybe he really needed that testosterone and it was only a doctor screw-up that did him in. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Or maybe you’ll decide you don’t care for a different reason. Maybe you think it didn’t affect his performance in the fight, or you just don’t care what drugs these guys are on as long as there’s an entertaining fight in the end. Maybe you figure they’re all doing something, these cage fighters, so it’s not worth it to try to keep up with the ratios and the exemptions and all the other stuff that’s flooded into the MMA vocabulary these past few years.

At this point, I almost don’t care where the sport as a whole comes down on the TRT issue, but it does seem like we’ve got to make a decision and be done with it. Either we care about the use of synthetic testosterone, or we don’t. Either it matters, or it doesn’t.

Please, let’s just pick one. If we don’t, we’re just going to keep having this same vague argument forever, until all the MMA writers break the T and R buttons on our keyboards and those of you reading get so bored that your eyeballs suck back into your skulls.

I’m not sure why, but this feels like the point where we’ll finally have to decide, if only so we’ll know how to file this one unforgettable fight in among the other great fights piled up in our memory banks. Do we put an asterisk on it? A scarlet T? Do we just shove it in the attic and agree never to speak of it?

It’s hard to know, and that’s the problem with testosterone. Steroids are wrong. We know that. You can’t do steroids in sports, and if you do them, then you’re a cheater. But synthetic testosterone is something that some people get to do, if their doctor says so and they get their paperwork in order, but then they only get to do a certain amount. We acknowledge that it’s performance-enhancing when we catch people doing it without permission, or if we catch them doing too much of it at the wrong time, but stay just under that red line and for some reason we regard that as just performance-enhancing enough.

It’s a ridiculous setup, so it’s no wonder we keep having problems with it.

And by we, I mean the whole MMA universe. That includes the state athletic commissions here in the U.S., which either can’t afford or just won’t do the tests required to make sure that testosterone isn’t being abused. It includes the Comissao Atletica Brasileira de MMA (CABMMA), the regulatory MMA body in Brazil (and a commission whose medical director, by the way, is Dr. Marcio Tannure, who Silva said put him on testosterone in the first place and then upped his dosage before the Hunt fight). It also includes the UFC, which acted as its own regulatory body in Australia for UFC Fight Night 33 in Brisbane, which means it also secretly approved the exemption for Silva, despite his positive steroid test in California in 2008.

This wasn’t some guy handing a wad of cash to some shady character in the locker room of his gym, and receiving a brown paper bag full of illicit goodies in return. It wasn’t as simple as one man deciding to cheat and then doing it. Depending on what you think about Silva’s rogue doctor explanation, you might not even be able to decide whether anyone did cheat here. Except that someone must have, because out of the two guys in this heavyweight classic, one guy got suspended and the other guy got his bonus money. Damned if we agree on why or what it means or whose fault it is.

That’s why I say we need to make up our minds, and quick. Otherwise it will only be a matter of time before there’s another great fight, followed by another report of elevated testosterone, followed by a retroactive admission of totally legitimate medical treatments gone awry. Then cue that feeling again, that taste of something good going sour.

By then maybe we’ll have decided we don’t care. Or, even worse, maybe we’ll be so used to it that we won’t even notice.

For complete coverage of UFC Fight Night 33, stay tuned to the UFC Events section of the site.

(Pictured: Antonio Silva)