This was a few springs ago, when Darryl Strawberry first started coming back around spring training at Port St. Lucie. Strawberry was swapping tales about the old days, when baseball was about eighth or ninth on his priority list, when he was young and strong and believed with all his heart that he would be able to launch baseballs toward the sun until he was 80 years old.

“You hear all the time about young kids who feel like they’re bulletproof?” Strawberry said that sunny morning. “Me, I was whatever level you’re at after bulletproof. I was indestructible.”

He wasn’t, of course, because none of them are, not if they don’t take care of themselves and honor the gifts and the talents they’ve been given. All of which leads us to Ben Roethlisberger, who is in the news again, who may or may not be in trouble again depending on what investigators learn of a sexual assault beef in Georgia.

Nobody should be quick on the draw with Roethlisberger, because right now nobody really knows what happened, same as nobody really knows, besides Roesthlisberger and the woman in question, what happened the last time this kind of charge was thrown at him, last year.

What we do know is this: Roethlisberger has developed a nasty habit of finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is this pickle. There was last year’s. There was the motorcycle accident a few months after he won his first Super Bowl. After a while, the only thing you can do is start to question the judgment of an athlete who literally has it all, who so often finds himself in positions that are at best difficult to explain, if not impossible to defend.

Roethlisberger has two Super Bowl rings, he is the quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers, one of the flagship brands of the NFL. On the field, he embodies everything you’d ever want in a quarterback: toughness, resilience, and an ability to shake off pain and hardship and, more often than not, delivering the goods.

But he is not bulletproof. He is not indestructible. There comes a time when every athlete learns this, sometimes the hard way. His time is at hand.

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Just say no: I think we’ve already seen the best of Laveranues Coles’ career during his two stays with the Jets. There is no need for a threequel.

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Begging for a miracle: Well, Stony Brook fell short. Hofstra fell short. We had Marist go 1-29 this year, and Fordham go 2-26, and Wagner 5-26, and Manhattan 11-20, which means this may well have been the single worst college basketball season in the history of our region. Of course it’s too much for ask for the remainders — Seton Hall, St. John’s and/or Rutgers — to make the kind of run through the Big East tournament that would land them in the NCAA (though Seton probably only needs to win two to sneak in); but isn’t that a worthwhile way to root anyway?

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Poor Joe: Awful news about Joe Nathan’s arm. Nathan, an upstate kid, worked his way into the top of the closing class, non-Mariano division, and all this does is re-affirm, one more time, what a physical marvel Rivera is, on top of being the best who ever lived at the role — sorry, Goose.