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Someone has to take this particular leap of faith, and I do so here and now while acknowledging that there are no guarantees and it is absolutely impossible in some facets of life to prove innocence, and particularly in regards to matters of doping and sports.
I am absolutely willing to be wrong. And if I am wrong about Dara Torres, feel free to dredge this particular piece of work up however many months or years it is down the line and wave it scornfully in my face and tell me I'm naïve or a sucker or worse.
But I don't think I'm wrong. I'm confident I'm right.
After years of experience covering dopers and doping, after talking at length to Dara herself and to others who ought to know, I believe she is clean.
Instead of viewing her comeback and her accomplishments with suspicion if not skepticism if not outright cynicism, she deserves to be celebrated.
At age 41, the mother of a 2-year-old daughter, Dara is reshaping the boundaries of what is possible.
At the just-concluded U.S. Olympic Trials in Omaha, Dara won both the 100m freestyle and 50m free sprints. She then announced she would drop the 100m to concentrate on the 50m, her specialty.
She will be the first American to swim in five Olympics.
She already owns nine Olympic medals. Including relays, she could win three medals in Beijing, and if she does, she will tie Jenny Thompson, at 12, for most in a career.
Dara's performances in Omaha have been greeted in some accounts with extreme suspicion.
This is the understandable, if regrettable, import of the BALCO scandal and the Mitchell Report, of Marion Jones and Floyd Landis and of far too many others in recent years.
Which I totally get.
I am, years into writing about sports as we see it, skeptical indeed.
I was suspicious of Marion Jones early on, when she was the face of magazine covers and such suspicion could be met by editors with hostility. In time, I was proven right.
Last year, I sat through all nine days of Floyd Landis' arbitration hearing in Malibu, Calif. Many in the press seemed to be showering in Floyd-flavored Kool-Aid. I wrote that the evidence clearly showed synthetic testosterone in his system for which he had no explanation. Time has again proven me right.
"What really sucks," Dara was saying Tuesday morning on the telephone, "is that I'm being questioned now and challenged to prove I am clean."
Which, candidly, she can not do.
The science is not there.
To be perfectly clear: there is no 100 percent guarantee.
Dara Torres won the 50m free final at Trials.
Dara Torres won five medals in Sydney.
I also acknowledge that we have heard others emphatically and indignantly deny suspicions of doping. Marion, in her 2004 autobiography, said in bright-red, all-capital letters that she had never taken drugs.
So why believe Dara?
Because, for one, the culture of American swimming is very different than the culture of track and field during the BALCO years.
By which I mean two things:
One, USA Swimming would never issue a meet credential to the likes of Trevor Graham, the coach - of Marion and other track stars - recently convicted himself in federal court of lying to federal agents.
Two, swimming was rocked in the 1970s by its own doping scandals, in particular involving East German swimmers. USA Swimming officials are acutely aware of the history. So, too, is Dara, who first swam in the Olympics in 1984.
"I'm clean," she said at a news conference last Tuesday in Omaha. "And I want clean sport. I swam against swimmers who were dirty my whole life. And that's just something I wouldn't do."
Though Dara can not prove she's clean, she is doing the very best next thing. She is one of a dozen volunteers - along with Michael Phelps and others - in a U.S. Anti-Doping Agency program, launched this spring, that collects blood and urine samples well beyond normal protocols.
I have said this before but at the risk of repetition say again: USADA can not afford for this program to fail.
Moreover, it's not just that Dara volunteered. It's how she volunteered.
She picked up the phone and asked to be tested.
Then, last fall, she traveled to Colorado Springs, where USADA is based, and met with chief executive Travis Tygart - one on one, without a lawyer or an agent at her side.
In that meeting with Tygart, she told him, as she recounted last week, "DNA test. Blood test. Urine test. Whatever you want to do. Just test me."
She added Tuesday on the telephone, "They can take my hair samples. I want to show everyone I am totally clean."
She said she already has undergone testing that would test anyone - last year hearing the knock of testers at her front door at 7 one morning when she was breastfeeding daughter Tessa.
The BALCO matter turned on a designer steroid that was by definition undetectable - until it was discovered. On Tuesday, Dara said, store my samples for as long as you'd like.
"They can keep them for as many years as they want to," she said. "They can test me later, if they want."
An emphasis now in the anti-doping arena is on making cases even without a positive test - via e-mails, letters and other evidence. To be blunt, USADA officials know how to readily contact the federal authorities who have prosecuted Jones, Graham and others. Why run that risk?
Yes, Graham supplied the syringe to USADA that ultimately helped unravel much of the BALCO case. But his motivations in that instance appear very different than Dara's now.
"I can't imagine any dirty athlete voluntarily agreeing to do that," Tygart said Tuesday, referring to Dara's willingness to volunteer to be tested in what would become the USADA pilot program. "You'd have to be the biggest risk taker and fool that ever existed."
Dara told Tygart, even as she told the press last week, that she would be an "open book" about what sorts of medicines and supplements she's taking.
At another news conference in Omaha, she acknowledged she is taking asthma medications - which she is, under the rules, allowed to do. Her late father, she said Tuesday, had "really bad" asthma, adding, "It runs in the family."
She said she takes an asthma med called Symbicort in the morning and at night. She takes Proventil "before I swim."
She also said in Omaha that she takes an amino acid supplement reputedly popular with some German athletes. On the phone Tuesday, she spelled out the website address (she is listed there, endorsement-style): www.fitness-nut.com.
Bottom line: what else is Dara supposed to do?
Just for the record: no one at NBC is putting me up to this. No editor, no senior management, suggested this column. This is my idea.
As we head toward the Beijing Olympics, Dara knows full well that the spotlight is only going to get brighter. She knows that any elite athlete - and her, for sure - is susceptible now to being seen as "basically guilty until you're proven innocent."
But there's no evidence she's guilty of anything.
Except, at 41, swimming really, really fast.
