INDIANAPOLIS – If you’ve been paying attention to news from the sporting world recently, then you already know some guy named Alfred Jazeera has accused a variety of aging professional athletes of doping with performance enhancing drugs (PEDs), including erstwhile Denver Broncos quarterback and insurance pitchman extraordinaire, Archie Eli “Peyton” Manning.

What you might not be aware of is the connection between the undercover investigator whose work serves as the basis for Mr. Jazeera’s claims and the adult entertainment industry. I discovered the connection through hours of diligent research, painstaking legwork and removing one letter from the published last name of the investigator, one “Liam Collins.”

While most mainstream news outlets have focused on Mr. Collins’ background as a British hurdler who was at one time an “English Schools champion” in the 110 meter hurdles — which means, essentially, he once outran a bunch of other pasty white guys with terrible teeth who weren’t skilled enough at soccer to play a sport about which their countrymen actually give a shit.

What the mainstream press hasn’t reported, whether due to laziness, incompetence or lack of creativity, is that Collins was at one time employed as the director of business development and director of special projects for adult entertainment studio Pink Visual, where Collins oversaw such things as the development of the company’s PVLocker platform, the acquisition of mission-critical office supplies like enormous bottles of Jameson Irish Whisky and the wearing of cool hats.

No doubt seeking to throw unsuspecting journalists off the trail of his pornographic past, somewhere along the line Colins added another ‘L’ to his name, moved to the UK and set out on a course that inevitably would result in conducting hidden camera interviews with folks who have sketchy-sounding names like “Charlie Sly” and “Danny Deceitful” and “Frankie Fulloshite.”

Speaking of Charlie Sly… My painstaking investigation has determined he, too, has a connection to the adult industry, having been named as a John Doe defendant in a lawsuit filed by Bachman & Turner & Overdrive LLP, an arena-rock law firm representing several adult entertainment studios, including Let It Ride, You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet and Hold Back the Water, in so-called “copyright ogre” actions.

At any rate, unfortunately for Jazeera and Collins, Sly has recanted all the claims he made to the undercover ex-pornographer concerning Manning’s use of HGH, saying he made up the whole thing in order to “test” Collins, whom he naturally didn’t trust, no doubt due to Collins’ confessed Irish ancestry.

Whether Sly also knew about Collins’s connection to incidents like Mansef (or Manwin or Mangeek or Manfred Mann, or whatever the company was called during the week when the purchase took place) buying Yappo.com, something told Sly that Collins was not someone to be trusted.

Since the publication of the story, every athlete named in the piece has come forward with a strong denial of the article’s claims — and if there’s anything we know about athletes accused of PED use, it’s the fact we can absolutely trust them when they strongly deny such allegations.

Plus, in the course of my research, I’ve stumbled across a perfectly reasonable explanation that accounts for both Sly’s claims about Manning and the reason Manning was so ticked off by the allegations.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a voice in my head explained how Sly first became suspicious of Manning — an explanation as reasonable and innocent as it was probably drug-fueled, seeing as how I took several grams of extremely potent psilocybin mushrooms shortly before receiving it.

“Mr. Sly caught wind of the fact a mysterious and shadowy figure named ‘Papa Jon’ was making regular deliveries of large, round objects concealed inside square cardboard boxes to the Manning home in 2011,” the voice explained. “From there, it’s perfectly understandable Sly mistook these Epic Meatz pizzas for unusually colorful, 18-inch-diameter tabs of somatotropin. This whole thing is nothing more than a massive, pizza-driven misunderstanding.”

Harder to explain is how and why Collins, a lanky, barely bearded but still-successful porn company executive, chose to set aside his career in adult entertainment to return to life as an obscure, past-his-prime track-and-field athlete.

Was it the irresistible draw of delicious crumpets at tea time? Did he just want to show off his perfectly aligned teeth, which are themselves doubtlessly a result of appearance-enhancing American orthodontic techniques? The answer is as murky as the River Thames — albeit a lot less likely to wind up with anybody “skiffing” in it.

It’s hard to say where this twisted tale of pro athletes and PEDs will lead next, although it seems certain the NFL will conduct a thorough, rigorous investigation that will turn up nothing. TMZ’s eventual scoop will produce video footage from a Las Vegas casino elevator showing a person who appears to be Manning snorting some sort of powder off Ray Rice’s knocked-unconscious wife between exchanging high-fives with Jose Canseco and Barry Bonds.

Also hard to predict is the next step in Collins’s long, strange trip through porn, athletics and exotic haberdashery. Will he return to the world of porn to launch — and subsequently shut down for lack of profitability — another revolutionary content-distribution platform? Throw himself into a futile effort to qualify for the 2016 summer games? Conduct further undercover operations to blow the lid off illicit Mountain Dew use among professional Madden 15 players?

Only time will supply the answers to these questions, because the anonymous voice in my head has made it clear from now on, he’s sticking to interpreting the instructions repeatedly barked by my neighbor’s dog.