It was a typical Lance Event, although it was about as far from the bike as it gets. It was about spectacle, managed production and trying to craft another chapter in a punctured epic that has lost its helium and sunk to earth.

It was about what it is always about with Lance Armstrong: hubris and control, the same tightly intertwined strands of his DNA that convinced him he would never be exposed, that the dozens and dozens of people privy to his pyramid scheme would remain muzzled forever.

It was desperate. And huge chunks of it ranged from disingenuous to unbelievable. There was far too much defiance, contradiction of evidence and abdication of responsibility to respond to in one column, although I will start by saying that I don't believe for a minute that he was clean in his comeback. And we've seen only half the footage from the Oprah Winfrey interview.

Armstrong exerted the last bit of leverage he had left in public life by going big-picture pop-culture first. He decided to take aim at hearts and minds rather than making the kind of detailed confession to legal and anti-doping authorities that would have advanced the plot and made a small start on freeing him up to lead the rest of his life. It was a delusional move, not to mention an utterly backward one. Armstrong is a toppled despot, a statue pulled off his pedestal, but his legs are still moving reflexively in the rubble. By force of lifetime habit, he's still trying to shape his own narrative.

Lance Armstrong has had little practice at defeat. That showed Thursday. Mark Gunter/AFP/Getty Images

There will be a colossal amount of time expended in the next 48 hours taking his emotional temperature, parsing his facial expressions and applying sincerity sensors to his tone of voice. And it will be time entirely wasted. The one absolute truth that has emerged about Armstrong over the past 15 years, much of which I spent observing him at close range, is that he is one of the world's most gifted actors. There was no manifesto like an Armstrong manifesto, no gimlet-eyed stare-down any more Oscar-worthy.

Beware of the sudden conversion. Beware of loose ends that are too neatly cauterized. Beware of a man who is powering past the mile markers of the past two decades, up the latest mountain of his life, at such dizzying speed -- pages fall off the calendar! -- that it's clearly impossible he could be doing it naturally. The legions of people he bullied, knifed and misled are not so easily dropped.

Beware of myth-making. That's what wrong-footed so many about Armstrong in the first place.

Forget about trying to judge his contrition level. Here's the thing: It doesn't matter. Oprah's interview, with all due respect to her and her efforts to do a credible job, is window dressing. Armstrong can make a valuable contribution to the body of knowledge about doping whether he is sincerely sorry or not. But little of what he said Thursday night leads me to believe he's ready to do that.

He could start by detailing the methods he used to beat those hundreds of tests he held up like a hall pass all these years. He is a walking, talking Rosetta Stone who could almost single-handedly light the match that finally leads to much-needed reform of the international federation that runs cycling and dismantles the questionable cabal that oversees it in this country.

He can agree to pay back a substantial portion of the money the U.S. government has spent investigating him and help make good on an obvious breach of contract with the naive but still rightfully owed U.S. Postal Service. Fairness ceased being a part of this years ago, but I have zero problem with the fact that his former teammate Floyd Landis, whose belated honesty kicked down the first of many doors, would stand to get a cut of it in his capacity as a plaintiff in a federal civil whistle-blower lawsuit.

But Armstrong can help bring about those outcomes only if he shuts down his most basic instincts. I have serious doubts that the once-consummate enforcer of omerta can bring himself to rat out virtually every single person who aided and abetted his cheating. And if he somehow machetes a path back to competition through that jungle, I wonder who's going to be left to help him rebuild? Will there be a single person standing who has the energy?

I'm not suggesting all of the emotion can or should be siphoned out of this week's extravaganza. So many people still bear the mark of Armstrong's bulldozer treads. So many people are entitled to decide between permanent scorn and forgiveness. That is their right.

I've had a taste or two of Armstrong's intimidation myself -- not nearly on the level of the wrecking ball he swung at the steadfast Betsy and Frankie Andreu, or his bright, articulate former soigneur Emma O'Reilly, or his ex-personal assistant Mike Anderson, or Greg and Kathy LeMond, or the relentless journalist David Walsh, or others too numerous to name, all labeled as unhinged, vindictive and jealous. But enough so that I can empathize.

At the Tour of California bike race in February 2009, early in Armstrong's ill-conceived comeback, I was on the business end of one of his vintage, hourlong telephone browbeatings. I had written a column explaining how he had misled the world about his much-vaunted "extra" drug-testing program with anti-doping researcher Dr. Don Catlin, saying it was under way when, in fact, it was a nonstarter.