Roger Clemens had to know it would come to this. He had to know his high-stakes game of chicken with steroid investigator George Mitchell and the steroid grandstanders in Congress would end with a perjury investigation and maybe a federal indictment.

He had to know it because any first-year law school student could have told him so, and most assuredly his high-priced legal team laid out the whole thing right from the beginning.

Which means this might have been part of the plan all along.

Think about it. Whether Clemens used steroids and human growth hormone or is the victim of a logically inconceivable conspiracy to soil his name, the only hope for protecting his legacy is the creation of plausible doubt and the passage of time.

Strangely enough, the decision yesterday by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to refer the case to the Justice Department for investigation might end up working out in his favor.

The past couple of months have been spent in a public campaign to refute the allegations of personal trainer Brian McNamee, who testified under oath that he injected Clemens with steroids and hGH and whose questionable credibility has been bolstered by the supporting testimony of Andy Pettitte and Chuck Knoblauch.

Clemens and his legal team have known since before the release of the Mitchell Report what was coming, and attorney Rusty Hardin indicated early on that Clemens was aware his strong denials would likely put him in front of a congressional committee. Everyone knew that would make Clemens vulnerable to a perjury investigation, so it's not unreasonable to conclude that Hardin and co-counsel Lanny Breuer factored it into the long-term equation.

If this sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory, maybe it is, but try to wrap your mind around the concept that a perjury indictment and acquittal might leave Clemens with the "benefit of the doubt" he asked for on 60 Minutes but has not received from the American public.

Hardin almost seemed to hint at that in December, when he complained to the Houston Chronicle that there was no legal platform to challenge the allegations in the Mitchell Report.

"How does he [Clemens] challenge it? Since there's not going to be a charge because it wasn't a crime, there's not going to be any prosecution," Hardin said at the time. "Sen. Mitchell himself said that, there's not going to be any forum to challenge this."

Of course, no responsible attorney would encourage his client to put himself in such legal jeopardy, but Clemens seemed committed from the outset to an all-or-nothing effort to clear his name.

And it might not be such a gamble, anyway. The Justice Department will have to open the investigation or face the appearance of selective prosecution because it already has indicted Barry Bonds on perjury and obstruction charges, but the likelihood of convicting Clemens with an untrustworthy character such as McNamee as the chief prosecution witness seems slim.

That should have been obvious at the Feb. 13 hearing, during which several committee members attacked McNamee's credibility with accounts of earlier steroid denials and - in one case - alleged false statements to police in an unrelated sexual assault investigation.

Even with the damaging testimony of Pettitte and the handful of factual inconsistencies in Clemens' sworn testimony, it takes only one juror to smell a steroid-dispensing rat, and "The Rocket" can say forever that his credibility has been confirmed in a court of law.

That's why, in the end, the Justice Department probably will choose not to indict Clemens, which also will provide cover for a guy willing to grab on to any small measure of vindication.

If all this seems a bit far-fetched, consider the alternative: There was no strategy at all, just a stubborn client and a series of inexplicable missteps by a couple of the best minds in the legal world.

Well, there is that.

peter.schmuck@baltsun.com

Listen to Peter Schmuck on WBAL (1090 AM) at noon most Saturdays and Sundays.