NEW YORK (MCT) – It played out like a movie script, kicking off like a secret-agent flick and concluding like the biopic of a religious leader.

Roger Clemens awoke in his Houston-area home a year ago this morning, boarded a plane to New York with his agent Randy Hendricks and sneaked into Yankee Stadium. During the seventh-inning stretch of that day’s Yankees-Mariners game, venerable Stadium public-address announcer Bob Sheppard directed the crowd to George Steinbrenner’s box.

“Well, they came and got me out of Texas, and I can tell you it’s a privilege to be back,” Clemens told the roaring fans. “I’ll be talking to y’all soon.”

He was a returning hero, and a rich one, as the Yankees paid him a prorated salary of $28 million to come back. At 44, the seven-time Cy Young Award winner was the talk of the baseball industry.

Today … well, if someone hadn’t already come up with the phrase “What a difference a year makes,” the turn that Clemens’ life has taken in the last 366 days would have created it.

Clemens limped off the Yankee Stadium mound last Oct. 7, unable to complete his goal of helping the Yankees win a 27th World Series title and prompting questions whether his body had finally quit on him. But time has turned that into a mere footnote.

Accusations of illegal performance-enhancing drug use have savaged his professional reputation. Reports of infidelities have shaken up his family.

Most daunting of all, Clemens’ very freedom is in question, as the Justice Department is investigating whether Clemens perjured himself in his Feb. 13 testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Seemingly teflon for the first 45 years of his life, able to shake off any accusation that came his way by riding his right arm to more victories and dollars, Clemens is now anywhere but on top.

“Obviously, you hate to see it, that’s for sure,” said Andy Pettitte, whose congressional testimony helped put Clemens’ fate in the hands of the Justice Department.

And don’t count on another Clemens comeback to mend any wounds. Both after last season and when the Mitchell Report came out, friends of Clemens told Newsday they believed that he would pitch again in 2008. He didn’t like the way his 2007 season ended, the friends said, and he would want to further his argument that he didn’t need illegal PEDs to attain his success.

But now, as a Clemens’ friend put it, “The window is closing.” The friend, speaking on the

condition of anonymity, believes that Clemens is too distracted by his ongoing, multiple, off-the-field dramas to engage in a major-league baseball season.

“There’s a lot of stress there,” the friend said, referring to Clemens’ home. “They’re hurting, big-time.”

Former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, appointed by Bud Selig to investigate baseball’s past regarding illegal PEDs, released his report Dec. 13 and dedicated roughly nine of his 311 pages to Clemens, the most for any player. Former Yankees assistant strength coach Brian McNamee, whom Clemens worked with in both Toronto and New York, alleged that he had injected Clemens with different steroids, as well as human growth hormone.

Of the nearly 100 players named, only Clemens truly went on the offensive. With more to lose than any other accused player, Clemens took on the report, the institution of Major League Baseball and McNamee, a full-bore attack on everyone’s credibility.

The results of such a strategy, executed by high-profile Houston attorney Rusty Hardin, have been nothing short of catastrophic for Clemens – and, for what it’s worth, for Hardin’s reputation as a sound legal mind.

His filing of a defamation lawsuit against McNamee, and his Jan. 7 airing of a taped phone call in which McNamee discussed his sick son, turned McNamee from a reluctant whistleblower into a

direct enemy. McNamee knew of countless skeletons in Clemens’ closet, and, coincidence or not, a great deal of negative information about Clemens has come out since that day.

When the Daily News released a series of stories about Clemens’ alleged extramarital affairs last week, under the questionable theory that these would be relevant in his defamation suit against McNamee, even Hardin sounded blown away.

“He’s getting pummeled,” Hardin told The Associated Press. “I’ve never seen somebody get beat up like this. In some ways, I think we’re on uncharted ground.”

Monday, the Houston Chronicle published a statement by Clemens in which the former pitcher admitted to making “mistakes” in his personal life, while not quite admitting to the infidelity charges and also denying once more the illegal PED accusations.

He and his wife, Debbie – who wound up admitting to her own HGH use in the congressional hearing – are still spending time together.

And though Clemens won’t quite be filing for bankruptcy, the ratio of money going out to money coming in has dwindled dramatically, between the lack of a baseball player’s salary and the massive bills for Hardin’s services.

It’s not a charmed life, for sure. Nothing like it was a year ago. Right now, for Roger Clemens, this resembles only a horror film.