Next time, maybe, everyone behaves better, and sanity does not run amok on the streets and airways. Not at least until authorities can truly find out why the woman yelled rape.

Next time.

This time, the attorney general of North Carolina tells us now the Duke lacrosse players didn’t do it.

Sorry, guys.

All those magazine covers … all those protests that made you People’s Exhibits A, B and C of social outrage … all those experts who went on television to tell the world why you might be felons … never mind. What else can we say but … “oops?”

All’s well that ends well, right fellas?

You may return to your normal lives. And we happen to have a phone number here where you can call to get new names, Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses and fingerprints.

And we look forward to the People magazine spread in 20 years, when you’re the subject of “Whatever happened to…”

For now, this case seems to be closed, but the question remains open: Have we all learned one bloody thing here?

Probably not. But gee, let’s hope so.

To be sure, I have not come to propose sainthood for Messrs Evans, Finnerty and Seligmann. Don’t know them. Never met them. Can’t say if they are Boy Scouts, party animals, or just college kids somewhere in between. Yet I am still a little confused as to how a lacrosse team came into contact with a stripper. It does appear they did not deserve to have their lives blowtorched for a year. And many folks are to blame.

This is not the only occasion a rush to judgment has occurred – not to mention a rush to print, rush to broadcast, rush to prosecute, rush to condemn. This time it happened to be well-off white guys dragged through the mud. Fortunate for the Duke trio, they could afford good lawyers. Many others can’t.

The message here is how quickly mass media can turn to mass accusations. And how, in a culture that so often displays seething partisanship by race and class and political leaning, human beings can swiftly be borrowed as tools for a cause.

We list the woes of society: the undeniable plague of violence against women; the smug cool of athletes who have been programmed to feel themselves above the rules; the smooth freeway for the affluent, against the hard road of potholes for those left behind.

Then a case comes along that appears to so perfectly and neatly tie up this whole package of ills. It’s too good to miss, too good to be reasonable about, or patient about. The shouting begins, the masses gather, the advocates have their faces of wrong to use as examples. Those three guys on TV.

Except for one trifling matter.

What if they didn’t do it?

But why pause? Not if their guilt makes too compelling a case for our grievances. Facts and figures have always been bent and manipulated to bolster a position. Now lives and reputations are bent, too.

The same thing, by the way, will happen the next time an NFL player is arrested. It will be assumed he is the latest example of an outlaw league, spinning out of control.

He may or may not be. But it is certain that many people won’t wait to find out the truth. The Rutgers women held a press conference the other day when they talked, quite justifiably, of the hurt and damage done to them by Don Imus. That was by one line from a nonthinking talk show host.

Imagine being portrayed coast to coast as perpetrators of a sexual assault and the embodiment of racial injustice and privileged villainy. Or to look outside the windows and know all the people are marching about you. That is hurt, that is damage.

To learn from this is not to accept woman as targets, or ignore racial bias. It is to understand that nothing stands long without truth, and sometimes truth takes awhile.

Maybe next time. Please, next time.