I’ll miss him — if he’s truly gone. The trouble is, I don’t know whether he really has retired or not.

It’s hard to blame players for sitting out for a year then deciding they didn’t really want to take the rest of their lives off. In the good old days, they really didn’t have much choice about coming back. That was before medical science had become adept at putting broken and shredded joints and tissues back together nearly as good as new, before scientific training techniques made it possible for athletes to stave off the effects of aging.

Back then, players didn’t work out, and doctors couldn’t reassemble them when they broke. If you took a year off, you were finished.

But now, players can keep working out, get into even better shape, and give it another shot. They’re never the same after a lay-off — although Martina Hingis looked pretty good in making it all the way to the quarterfinals at the Australian Open after her unretirement — and with each successive retirement, they come back diminished.

Even if they play effectively, as Jordan did with the Washington Wizards, they’re still not what they were. The only athlete I can think of who breaks that rule is Roger Clemens, who may or may not be in his second retirement as I write this.

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But Clemens points out another problem. He retired after the 2003 season, then came back. After the 2004 season, we went through a pre-retirement that didn’t take. This off-season, it’s more of the same. He hasn’t embarrassed himself by continuing to come back, but he has certainly killed the thrill of retirement. Even if he says he’s done this year, who’s to say he won’t be back in midseason or even a year from now?

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Clemens makes me think of Lance Armstrong, who went through the same exercise after winning his sixth Tour de France. The will-he-or-won’t-he game is fun once, but when everybody starts playing it, it gets old fast.

I hate to sound like a curmudgeon, and I don’t really think I am. I’m not one who longs for the good old days. Instead, I think today’s athletes are better than ever, as are the games they play.

But I will say this about them: These kids today don’t have a clue about how to retire.