I have made this argument before. Perhaps on this blog. I hope it’s new to some of you … those of you who are not baseball fans, and don’t already know this.

The greatest suffering a sports fan can endure? The collapse of a baseball team.

This is not the sudden shock of a shootout defeat in a World Cup. Not like football (American or global) where a team can come apart in one afternoon. Nothing in individual sports can even begin to approach it.

The collapse of a baseball team is the worst torment in global sports.

For one very good and obvious reason:

Because the baseeball season is so long. A collapse, then, unfolds in slow motion. It can go on for weeks. A month. And it generates continuous misery Every Single Day for 30, 45, 60 days.

Show me any other sport that can cause that much suffering, incrementally, like water torture, day after day, for that length of time. Really. I’m waiting.

Baseball is unique in this. Because the season is so long. Because a team can look so good for four months and so wretched for the final two. Happens to someone almost every year.

I still remember — 37 years later — the Dodgers’ collapse of 1973.  They somehow were well ahead of the Big Red Machine into July. I want to say up by seven, eight, nine games, even. It was a Sunday in Cincinnati. They had a doubleheader. Televised. The Dodgers led in the ninth inning of the opener … and some random guy, a backup catcher, named Hal King (I’m going to check on his name, but I’m 99 percent sure that’s right — 37 years later) hit a walkoff grand slam, the shocked Dodgers lost the nightcap, and the Reds ran them down a month later. (OK, looked it up. Yes, it was Hal King. It was a three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth, not a slam. Don Sutton was pitching with a 3-1 lead. On July 1.)

The Dodgers  blew that huge lead in 1951. The Angels had a similar collapse in 1994. The Cubs did it in 1969, when they were overhauled by the Miracle Mets. The Red Sox went there in 1978, when Bucky Dent’s home run beat them in a one-game playoff after the Yankees caught them.

Ths year’s “put me out of my misery” collapse is that of the San Diego Padres.

On Aug. 25, they were 76-49 and held a 6.5-game lead over the Giants in the National League West. Stat geeks will tell you that a lead of that significance, with barely five weeks to play … well, the team in the lead is going to finish first a high percentage of the time. In theory, if you can get 27 games over .500 after 123 games, it is unlikely you suddenly will turn into a loser.

A problem with there Padres, however, was … they weren’t very good. They never were. They began the season with the second-lowest payroll in baseball. They had one hitter who evoked fear (Adrian Gonzalez) and their pitching rotation was a hope and a prayer: Jon Garland, Mat Latos, Kevin Correia, Clayton Richard, Matt LeBlanc and Chris Young, till his arm blew up after one April start.

Yet there they were with, as I recall, the best record in the National League on Aug. 25.

San Diego fans had to be giddy. Their team, which rarely makes the playoffs and has never won a World Series, was inexplicably good. Remarkably clutch. Maybe more than a little lucky.

Then it fell apart. A 10-game losing streak that all but wiped out their lead. A mini recovery, then another plunge. A week or two of nip-and-tuck with the Giants, trading the lead back and forth. Three games with the Giants of excruciatingly tight dimensions, only one of which the Padres won.

If you are a Padres fan … well, that makes you one in a select club. But if you are a Padres fan, you have been in agony since the last week of August. When the Padres started going south … well, you knew it would happen, didn’t you. But your pain was just beginning.

You are now five full weeks into a constant fear and loathing that never lets up. It’s there in the morning. It’s there at night. You wake up and wonder “what can go wrong today?”

The Padres just played four games, at home, against the Chicago Cubs. They lost three of them, including an excruciating 1-0 defeat yesterday (Heath Bell, the team’s best pitcher, gave up one run in the ninth to lose) that gave the Padres their 22nd defeat in 34 games and dropped them three back of the Giants with three games left — in San Francisco.

(Even the Padres’ unofficial good-luck charm, Michelle, whom I wrote about a few days ago: She went down to San Diego on Tuesday to see a team that was 7-0 with her in the house … and they lost. Yeah. Big “uh-oh.” She sent me a note saying “the Padres look dead. They look exhausted.” I guess that can happen to a team that overachieves for 123 games.)

The Padres still have a chance. That’s the final torment of it. Sweep the Giants this weekend, and they have a one-game playoff on Monday … and the way it seems to work in baseball, the most painful end is the outcome most likely to occur. Though the idea of the Padres sweeping the Giants seems ridiculous, at the moment. Especially when the Giants are just better. It would be worse for “drama” but better for traumatized Padres fans if they just lost tonight to Matt Cain, and it’s over. They will suffer no more.

I’m telling you … there’s nothing like it. Constant pain for day after day after godforsaken day.

The greatest torment in sports.