It's been five years since P.J. Carlesimo tried to say those scratches on his neck were no big deal, five years since Latrell Sprewell tried to say that Carlesimo had them coming.

But as these things usually work out, they were both wrong. They were a big deal, Carlesimo didn't have this specific punishment coming, and both men have paid full retail for being so wrong.

	Latrell Sprewell, left, crossed paths with P.J. Carlesimo the next season as a Knick.

Sprewell came out better in the short run. He missed a hunk of an already lost season, made his money, then made even more with the New York Knicks. Today, however, they are sick of him, he is sick of them, and New York is sick of both of them.

And Carlesimo? Well, it's hard to say how he came out. He got his windpipe massaged, got fired for failing to make the Golden State Warriors sit up and bark, went to television where he was at best mildly underwhelming as both an analyst and as a studio talking head, and only three months ago got a seat back on the bench, as an assistant to Gregg Popovich in San Antonio.

Which is how it might have ended up anyway, even without Sprewell's seemingly felonious intervention.

That is, if Carlesimo or the Warriors had ever bothered to press charges, which they never did. He tried to minimize the damage to his career. The Warriors tried to minimize the damage to the amount of money they had to pay Sprewell. And Sprewell tried to minimize the damage by saying Carlesimo was persistently abusive.

And nobody bought any of their explanations, which is why they are all in the positions they are today.

America's mood at the time was to demand that Sprewell be led away in cuffs and with an overcoat draped over his head (optional). Sports Fan Inc. wanted Carlesimo to rise up and demand that the entire book be thrown at Sprewell, not a small leaflet. The Pundit Army wanted the Warriors to fire Sprewell, refuse to pay him and let the courts settle it.

Instead, they all tried to shy away from the magnitude of the event, trying to make it seem manageable, even controllable. It wasn't. It still isn't. Everyone agreed that the strangulation was wrong and unfortunate, but those were just words. It was an issue that demanded a more frontal approach from everyone involved, instead of leaving it as a contractural matter for an arbitrator, which of course the Warriors lost because, well, that's what they've been good at for almost an entire decade.

	There was no resolution. There was, however, a slow but steady erosion of all their positions in time, to the point where Sprewell is now the symbol of the worst the Knicks have to offer, Carlesimo is a coaching afterthought, never to run his own NBA sideline again.

There was no resolution. There was, however, a slow but steady erosion of all their positions in time, to the point where Sprewell is now the symbol of the worst the Knicks have to offer, Carlesimo is a coaching afterthought, never to run his own NBA sideline again unless Popovich gets kicked out of a game for calling Joey Crawford a foul name.

And the Warriors? As irrelevant now as they were then, a classic example of how inertia gets to us all.

That's the real lesson here, if there is one. Eventually, sometimes very eventually, everyone gets theirs. Revenge being a dish best served cold, it can be said that this one was put in the spare freezer, next to that freeze-dried venison your wife bought on a lark one day, and it was removed one bite at a time.

If this is justice, and there is no suggestion here that it is, it can often be just a slow, painful corrosion of reputations. Carlesimo tried to dismiss the problem, and as a result saw his coaching style become part of the national debate. Sprewell was the bad guy who eventually found redemption when the Knicks made their last run toward glory, and then lost it again when they went south.

And neither of them will leave the game the same way they came in. If that's a lesson you can live with, fine. Otherwise, nothing has been learned, nothing has been revealed. The bad deed of the age has been reduced to an afterthought, a blip on a far too crowded screen.

Ray Ratto, a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle, is a regular contributor to ESPN.com