Well, that was close. I don't know that America was ready for the idea that the Russian mob was trucking in ringers for the Harlem Little League team.

We were already having trouble keeping all the other outrages straight ... the notion that figure skating is crooked ... labor discord in baseball ... the suspicion that NFL officials were wasting perfectly good payback on the Oakland Raiders for an exhibition game ... managers who can't keep their lineup cards straight.

We were, frankly, running out things to feign belief in.

Miraculously, though, the folks at Little League Interplanetary Headquarters discovered late Thursday night that the Harlem team in fact had nothing but homegrowns on its roster, or at the very least sufficient documentation to shut up the complainers.

True, they found the paperwork late in the game, the bureaucratic version of "Rolando Paulino's dog ate our homework,'' but they found it just in time to save the Little League big shots another gruesome scandal.

In fact, it seemed as though even the team that would have benefited from the Harlemites' expulsion, Lehigh Little League of Bethlehem, Pa., was relieved to learn it lost fair and square to a team with a kid who called his shot. I mean, that's annoying, but it still beats getting to the big one and being fingered as "the team that backed in.''

That is, after all, what awaited the lads from Bethlehem if they'd been waved in to replace Harlem. Plus, the ruling spared all the other teams Harlem beat on its way to Williamsport from wondering, "What if they phonied their IDs?''

Kids, after all, already have enough stress just getting through their days -- making sure the van has enough gas for Mom to get them to their practices, making sure Dad has kept his schedule flexible enough for a moonlight game of Burn Out in the back yard, keeping the siblings away during those quiet moments when they are breaking down film of the next night's opposing pitcher, deflecting claims of steroid abuse if they happen to have a growth spurt in July.

They play 60, 70, 80 games a summer if they're good enough and the coach in charge of scheduling has been laid off his job and doesn't having anything better to do.

It seems unreasonable, then, to ask them to affect a Col. Klink accent and go to every game with the lyrical Teutonic chant, "Papers, please,'' on their lips.

Then again, this is one of the things that happen when parents come to the games: Documentation.

You see, somewhere in the recesses of Little League was a parent who cheated. We don't know his name, but we suspect it was Phil DeMullion of Plano, Texas, who decided that his kid needed a leg up in the innocent pastime of semi-competitive baseball.

So he pulled a fast one, and got away with it. Then he pulled another one. Then other people got wind of his fast one and pulled a faster one for their kids. And before long, Danny Almonte was driving his teammates to the games.

There is, of course, no correcting this. Parents are much more eager and creative cheaters than kids. You can spot a kid cheating a mile away, and other kids are real good at spotting it even without having to produce papers. They either convince the kid to back down, quit playing and go find something else to do, or in extreme cases beat the cheater up a bit.

Now we don't encourage this sort of behavior, although God knows we'd show it on the evening news if the other stories were lousy. But there was something about playground justice that seemed to keep all the kids in line. You want to play, play fair, or face the consequences, even if it means calling your dad at work and asking him to leave the office so he can help you get your underpants off the top of the flagpole.

No more. To play baseball, soccer, football or even chess, you need documentation to get more documentation, and don't worry about the DNA because they'll get it off that gum they just gave you. I mean, they're just asking for it at that point.

Fortunately, the Harlem team had its documentation. But if one kid scrapes himself sliding and his blood doesn't match the type they put on the form, well, there'll be hell to pay, and we've got just the parents to do it, too.

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