Barry Bonds had more accusations than answers at his news conference. AP

Barry Bonds wants us all to move on. He wants us to forget about the past -- it's the past, you know? -- and concentrate on the future. Bonds would like nothing better than to wipe out the last few years' worth of whispers and grand jury leakage and flaxseed oil and Jose Canseco's finger-pointing and just get the heck on with playing baseball.

Except, of course, there's a problem. It's the pesky media.

"All you guys lied. All y'all," Bonds screamed at a room full of media vermin in a contentious, defiant, sometimes confrontational and very bizarre news conference Tuesday in Scottsdale, Ariz.

"When your closet is clean," he advised the group, "come clean someone else's."

Now, Bonds berating the media and the media lashing out at Bonds is not exactly stop-the-presses stuff. Truth be told, no one cares, or certainly no one should care, about the often hate-hate relationship between baseball's best slugger and the poor saps who have to report about him to the fans.

Bonds, for the most part, doesn't like the media. And most members of the media -- this is purely my own observation here, folks -- would rather sit on a ripe old saguaro and spin for a half-day than tiptoe around the volatile Bonds. It's a mutual dis-admiration society. We get it already. We all get it.

But Tuesday was different. Bonds was at his surly best in his first appearance (and, surely, his last) of the spring, playfully toying with the media mice before whacking them over the head. In this news conference of the absurd, talk of steroids and the BALCO probe supposedly were taboo subjects. But reporters being reporters, they asked. And Bonds being Bonds, he responded.

Not directly, of course. Oh, Bonds can be an evasive guy. He danced around the direct questions, scowled at others, dismissed some out of hand. And when he answered, he seemed angry at times and frustrated at others.

More than anything, he seemed truly perplexed as to why anyone in the world would think that the topic of steroids still should be a valid point of discussion at all.

"We can go way back to the 1800s and basically asterisk a lot of sports," Bonds said. "It's time to move on."

Bonds, if he had his 'druthers, would have us all simply forget about what the use of performance-enhancing drugs has done to the game in the past several years. Never mind how the use of steroids and other drugs may have skewed some of baseball's most sacred records. Skip it with the scandal's shadow on the game's integrity.

After all, Bonds said -- dismissing the effects of these drugs with the lame "steroids don't help hand-eye coordination" argument -- it's yesterday's news. Turn the page.

"Allow the drug-testing program to work," he said. "Let's go forward. I truly believe we need to go forward."

Well, in that, we can all agree. None of us, fan or bench player, superstar or scribe, would like anything more than for all of this talk to die down and for everyone to get on with the game of baseball.

But that's not going to happen by trying to pass off this whole era as just another burp in the bloated history of sports. It's not going to happen by downplaying how widespread the use of these drugs has been or by downplaying their effectiveness.

You can't simply take what steroids has done to the game -- and will continue to do without all this attention -- and brush it aside. As much as we all might like to, we can't simply move on.

Turning our back on the problem, remember, is a big part of what got us into this pickle in the first place. If Bonds doesn't see that, maybe he's the one who's lying. To us. And to himself.