Yes, I thought I would ring in my return with a Backstreet Boys reference … no applase necessary, really.

It’s been too long since last we treaded these waters together — a big-time move to a new locale and a lack of Internet have kept me away from you, but no longer! Now Purple Bar Tape is back, hopefully to stay.

And as is the case with news, there are just days where it’s so easy to start swimming again. Case in point: Alberto the Contador might soon have a new team (Kudos to Hamso for calling this one).

It’s not at all hard to imagine Contador with Caisse d’Epargne — the best Spanish rider working for a Spain-based team that put another Spaniard atop the Tour podium in ‘08. It’s a natural fit.

But whatever team Contador joins, he needs to make damn sure he’s got the kind of control that only a select few team leaders possess. He needs to OK personnel decisions, sponsorship, mechanical issues — he needs Lance control.

Armstrong is going to come back next year with Team RadioShack or Team Shack or whatever, and he’s going to stack said squad up to his Texas eyes with talent. Why? Because he wants to beat Contador. Lance wants — very badly, I would think — to beat his former teammate (though we use that last word loosely).

He’s going to have the old domestiques — Popovych, Levi, maybe even Hincapie if he’s feeling crazy — and he’s going to find some young talent (Andy Schleck? It could happen…), and then he’s going to use all of that to launch what will presumably be one final assault on the Tour before he rides off into the Western sunset.

The only way Contador can match that is by making sure he joins a squad with the financial power to even try to compete with Armstrong, the clout to attract good young riders and the willingness to let the spindly Spaniard be the man at the very top of the food chain. Without that, Contador will find himself in very rough waters next July.

Very rough waters indeed.

Finally, it’s online.

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Well, they should be. And they are.

Lance Armstrong’s profile in the Tour de France was long one of antagonism between the Texan and pretty much anyone who was French and cared.

Tour officials openly questioned whether he could have accomplished what he did legally. French authorities repeatedly brought him under scrutiny, and more than one investigation promised to find Armstrong guilty of some impropriety, though none has to this point.

Armstrong being Armstrong, he fought back and fought back hard, doing everything short of personally trying to unliberate Paris.

Then he left — and the Tour just sort of died.

The assumption had been forever that Armstrong’s run of seven straight victories made the race itself boring, the same storyline playing out, over and over again. His retirement, surely, would usher in an age of more open competition between the Floyd Landises and Levi Leipheimers and Jan Ullrich’s (oops) of the world.

But then came Operation Puerto, and riders started dropping like flies.

Ullrich was gone, so was Basso. The proceeding years were fraught with scandal and doping accusations and blood bags and two-year bans.

The winner of the ‘06 Tour (Landis) lost his title after testing positive for elevated levels of testosterone, and the winner of the ‘07 Tour (Alberto Contador) only took top spot in that race after Michael Rasmussen, who had quite suddenly turned himself from a pumpkin to a diamond-studded carriage, dropped out amid accusations of doping.

Alexandre Vinokourov, the baby-faced, lovable Kazakh leader of Libery Seguros and Team Astana, was banned for two years after an incident during the 2007 Tour.

The race itself essentially became Survivor on bikes — whomever is the best among us who doesn’t dope, or at least doesn’t get caught, gets to take home top honors.

In American sports, this would cause massive fan outrage, media would call for all sorts of sweeping changes and Al Sharpton would probably go on record in some way or another.

But because a) it’s not the Tour de America and b) European sports are driven by the same sort of hype machines as their stateside counterparts, the Tour de France became something worse than tainted: It became effectively irrelevant.

In rides Armstrong on his Trek-made white horse to save the day. Suddenly, we forgot about Ricco and Vino and doping and the fact that Christian Vande Velde actually finished in the top five of a Tour de France, because there was genuine intrigue again.

Lance against the field, against Contador, against whatever. But for the first time since 2005, we cared about the race itself. It wasn’t overshadowed, it wasn’t ignored and no one was carried off in a police car. Not yet anyway.

The point is, like it or not Frenchmen, Lance made your race matter again, and this time for more right reasons than wrong ones. What’s more, next year’s TdF already has us watering at the mouth, and it’s not even the end of July 2009.

Even Prudhomme feels me: “Armstrong provided us with a rivalry and that’s the strongest thing in sport — Nadal v Federer in tennis, or Hinault v LeMond in cycling. The real rivalry was actually between Contador and Andy Schleck but the Contador/Armstrong row attracted most of the media attention.”

So maybe his comeback wasn’t so dumb after all.