The people, Vincent apparently meant, who were already cheering the admitted steroid user Jason Giambi for launching parabolic home runs at the old Yankee Stadium; the baseball executives in St. Louis and Los Angeles who ultimately welcomed a belatedly contrite Mark McGwire back into the game as a hitting coach; and the many, including a new commissioner, Rob Manfred, now making nice with Alex Rodriguez as he powers his way to the kind of season Bonds had in 2007 — 28 home runs, a .480 on-base percentage — while turning 42, before the sport lost his number and he moved on to stubbornly stare down the government.

“He could have spared himself and baseball so much by just coming clean,” Vincent said of Bonds in 2006, adding: “I never thought it should be about punishment. What good would that do?”

Finally, after an expensive, decade-plus chase of Bonds, baseball’s record-holder for home runs in a career (762) and single season (73), even the government gave up trying to pin the rap on Bonds. A one-paragraph motion by the United States Department of Justice announced last Tuesday that Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. would not ask the Supreme Court to review an appellate decision that overturned Bonds’s obstruction-of-justice conviction in 2011.

Consider this latest development a metaphorical walk-off blast off the bat of Bonds, but also a possible way forward for a sport still trying to find a road less potholed on the subject of performance enhancement. Finally free of legal entanglement, Bonds could, or should, become the example by which baseball can bring greater clarity to its moral ambiguity and ever-shifting standards that are now being applied to the multitude of high-end achievers from a tarnished era.

That group includes the admitted users and others who were entrapped by a test, or guilt by association, or mere suspicion. It also includes the newly triumphant Bonds, the all-time champion of dingers and denials. Beyond his already amicable relationship with the San Francisco Giants, his former team, he now merits acceptance somewhere else — in Cooperstown, courtesy of a 2016 election to the Hall of Fame.