* Or, the anatomy of a collapse.

I’ve been following sports since I was, like, 7 years old, which goes back to the Eisenhower Administration. I’ve watched the entire American suite of sports, and some of the international, too.

And my contention that the most painful experience for an American sports fan …

Is watching your baseball team blow a big lead. It is a roller coaster experience … but on a really long and really slow roller coaster. The months of the rush of building a healthy,  even fat lead … and the months that it generally takes for it all to come apart. It’s such prolonged pain. Like a water torture. Because you can see the collapse, but almost as if is unreeling in slow motion.

In other sports, a demise usually is short and brutal. But in baseball, watching a team take a big lead and then gradually but steadily give it up can make following a team extraordinarily painful.

And right now, that team would be the Dodgers.

The Dodgers led the Colorado Rockies by 15 1/2 games on June 3. Usually that means the trailing team is as dead as disco.

But the Rockies fired manager Clint Hurdle,  hired former Dodgers manager Jim Tracy, and they have been on a tear ever since.

It helps that the Dodgers have gone south as the Rockies have surged.

The Dodgers got to 27 games over .500 on July 22, but have been a shaky 13-18 since then.

The Rockies were 18-28 when Tracy took over, and bottomed out (literally, in the NL West) at 20-32 on June 3. Since then, the Rockies are a stunning 52-22.

So, it’s partly about the Dodgers failing to play well, but it’s just as much about the Rockies playing out of their minds for nearly three full months now.

Are the Dodgers “choking”?

Choking is such an ugly word, but it may be coming into play now. now that the Rockies are only two games back after their 10th inning victory in Denver on Monday night.

The Dodgers have been tight and tentative for months now. And they have a batch of players who have sagged.

James Loney, Orlando Hudson, Russell Martin and Manny Ramirez  have faded. Rafael Furcal has never really gotten going. Casey Blake has slowed, as well. Only Andre Ethier and Matt Kemp have really held up, and that’s not enough to keep a team on top.

The offense is a shadow of what it was back in the spring, when the Dodgers liked to believe they didn’t have an easy out.

But the pitching is a problem, too. Injuries and bad decisions have reduced the starting rotation to three guys (Billingsley, Wolf, Kershaw) of any competence, with the other two spots going to whoever happens to be vaguely healthy or newly arrived from Triple-A. That the Dodgers could have used Cliff Lee, who instead went to Philadelphia, is patently obvious.

Can the Dodgers survive this? They are still two games ahead of the Rockies, and if they split their final two games in Denver, they take that same lead out of town with five weeks and change to play.

And even if they can’t hold off the Rockies — who one wouldn’t think can continue to play at the .702 pace they have maintained since June 3 — the Dodgers remain six games ahead of San Francisco, the next-winningest team in the league, for the wild-card spot.

So, barring a further collapse, one approaching the definition of “epic” … this club ought to be able to get the wild card, at least.

Meantime, Dodgers fans are in the hurt locker, watching their team’s once formidable lead shrivel into nothingness, waiting for Loney and Martin to get it going, for Hudson and Ramirez to get it back, for Kuroda to get healthy and Belisario and Trancoso to regain their early form.

Could happen. For the sake of Dodgers fans, who have experienced a dull pain for a month, a pain that could escalate into agony any moment now …  it would be welcome relief if they could shake this funk and rebuild that lead.