It’s finally October, and like you I’m hoping for a few treats come Halloween, because we’ve already gotten more than enough tricks this racing season.

Actually, the entire year has had a costume-party air to it, with dope fiends dressed up as pro bicycle racers, George W. Bush masquerading as the president of the United States and Iraq all tricked out like Vietnam.

If there was ever any doubt that your average pro carries more needle scars than a dumb dog in porcupine country, the 2004 racing season laid it to rest, head off and face down, with a carbon-fiber stake through its enlarged heart. But who cares, besides David Walsh? A million suckers lined L’Alpe d’Huez during the Tour this year, and even more watched on TV back home, which means euros, dollars, baksheesh — as in money, baby, money. Gimme those vitamins, Doc, I want to be generating more watts than the Palo Verde nuclear power plant before the ’05 kickoff in Fromentine.

Oh, sure, payback’s a bitch: When a guy finally tests positive, he gets laid off just in time to take a short vacation. We’re not exactly talking hard time in the graybar hotel here. After all, as Filip Meirhaeghe has said, getting caught ain’t no big deal — it’s just bad luck. It’s not as though you got caught doing 110mph through a red light in Salt Lake City with a bottle of Jack in each tattooed fist, an underage girl’s face in your lap, and a books-on-tape edition of the Necronomicon blasting out of the old Blaupunkt. No, for that they’d give you a TV show and a “People” magazine cover.

For using EPO, human growth hormone or someone else’s red blood cells, riders like Meirhaeghe, David Millar and Oscar Camenzind draw a year or two off plus a fine they can cover by selling their old team kit at VeloSwap. A few of the smarter ones, like Camenzind, get to thinking what it would be like to catch a vengeful elbow in an iffy Alpine corner at 90kph and extend that suspension to a comfy retirement in some fashionable locale, whiling away the lonely hours by counting their money and smiling fondly at the memory of the expressions on clean riders’ faces when they shot past the pokey bastards like two-wheeled cruise missiles. But most are back in the pro peloton before you can say “Raimondas Rumsas,” smiling and waving and taking their vitamins.

This year, when even Tyler Hamilton was said to have too much blood in his blood, well — that was different, of course. The news that Tyler had tested positive for blood doping (rumors from the usually unreliable sources pegged his hematocrit at 666) caused nuns worldwide to shriek, “There is no God!” and flee their cloisters for massage parlors, street corners and corporate board rooms, while countless VeloNews letter-writers wept inconsolably into their keyboards, vowing to abandon cycling for clean sports like professional wrestling or powerlifting if the charges proved true.

Naturally, Tyler swore on the grave of Bram Stoker that he doesn’t sleep during the day, hanging upside down in a closet with his leathery wings folded, so WADA ordered Anne Rice deposed to provide her expert opinion. But the author of the fabled “Vampire Chronicles” can’t tear herself away from swapping bitch-slaps on Amazon.com with disappointed fans who think “Blood Canticle” sucks like Lestat after a thousand-year nap and a few bong hits, and thus the only truth we may ever know is that the line for Tyler’s autograph at Interbike stretched all the way down the Strip to the Circus Circus. Elvis hasn’t left the building yet, Bubba.

And speaking of Interbike, there’s a reason exhibitors tap kegs in their booths, and it’s not just to help me get over the shakes from getting overserved at the Tour de Fat in Flagstaff. This free beer is intended to (a) draw a crowd, and (b) numb said crowd against the disturbing epiphany that Whizzo Wheeled Goods’ latest and greatest, the single most revolutionary technical advancement in human-powered transport since Icarus sprouted wings, the veritable pinnacle of the framebuilder’s art, is … well … just another goddamn bicycle. There’s another one just like it in the next booth over, and in the one next to that, thanks to the unsung hordes of Asian welders turning tubing into two-wheelers for pennies a day.

To be sure, there are exceptions, lovingly crafted works of velo-art that you can’t afford unless you’re running for president or have a healthy white baby for sale. And to be absolutely fair, even the cheap crap is light-years ahead of the prehistoric machinery we rode back when pros and amateurs alike were as pure as the driven snow, if you didn’t mind overlooking a little speed-babble and the occasional steroid rage.

Still, in the final analysis, they’re all just bicycles — colorful amalgamations of tubes, wires and rubber — and I have a half-dozen of the things hanging in the garage, none of them ridden lately because I was either editing stories about dopers from the home office in Colorado Springs or stumbling around Las Vegas with a beer in one hand and a notepad in the other (the first reader to guess which hand was busiest wins a Spare Tire Ale pint glass from the Velo Catalogue).

There were bikes that looked like rocket sleds, and bikes that looked like motorcycles, and even bikes that looked like bikes (some old guy in Italy still makes one or two each year, I hear). But Interbike isn’t really about bikes, it’s about fads, and thus as I see it (somewhat blurrily, hint hint) in 2005 we will all be racing four-cross miss-and-outs on full-suspension, carbon-fiber choppers with titaniumpanniers. The good news is, per UCI regulations, the velodrome may erect only two artificial barriers along the stayer’s line.

Hey. Seriously. If cycling to you has become nothing more than the man of the hour or the bike of the century, you need to ride more often. God knows I do, and with the best part of October ahead of me and the worst of the year’s labors behind, I’m getting right after it.

Come All Hallow’s Eve, I’m going to dress up like a bicycle racer, pull down one of those dusty bikes in the garage and roll on over to the pumpkin patch to see if the Great Pumpkin finally shows up. My old buddy Linus always thought he would, one day, and he never tested positive.

Linus was quite the thumb-sucker, though, and between you and me, I always wondered whether there wasn’t a little something tucked away in that blanket that he wasn’t telling us about.

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Is he all dressed up and going nowhere, as usual, or has our house Jack O'Lantern managed to carve a crooked smile on your face? Let us know at webletters@insideinc.com. As bad as O'Grady is in our office, he's even worse at home. A word of caution before you click through: Here he has editors; there, he has only his own notions of self-restraint, which can be a very short leash indeed.