Doyel: People believe what they want. Believe this, Aaron Judge is the home run king.

Aaron Judge is Major League Baseball’s new single-season home run king. Roger Maris remains in the royal family, his photo on the castle walls. Babe Ruth is forever the sultan, the king emeritus, the one who built the castle.

Barry Bonds is the fraud. He will always be a fraud.

For some reason there has been pushback on Aaron Judge’s historic season, his MLB record, by people who don’t want to acknowledge he has done what nobody has ever done before. Barry Bonds didn’t do this, didn’t really break Roger Maris’ record, for the same reason Ben Johnson didn’t really break the 100-meter record at the 1988 Olympics, and for the same reason Floyd Landis didn’t really win the 2006 Tour de France.

Aaron Judge's 62nd HR ball:Fan who caught No. 62 offered $2M for ball

When people cheat, it doesn’t count. Ace a test in high school, but cheat to do it, and the teacher finds out. Did your perfect score happen? Nope, you get a zero, like it never happened.

Barry Bonds’ 2001 season is a zero. Never happened.

But people are strange these days, aren’t they? It’s not just baseball, not just sports, not just politics, not just the Divided States of America. People around the world are seeing what they want to see, remembering what they want to remember, denying what they want to deny. That’s what we’re doing with uncomfortable truths these days: Pretend it didn’t happen, aware of the strength in numbers. Lots of people will agree with us, insist that something did or did not happen, facts be damned.

We have become a world of pathological liars, actually believing the nonsense we’re saying.

And there are people saying Barry Bonds is the legitimate home run king, saying Aaron Judge fell 11 home runs short, congratulating him with condescension on the seventh-highest total of home runs in a season, behind Bonds, Mark McGwire (who played many seasons that didn’t happen, including two with more than 62 home runs), and behind Sammy Sosa (many seasons didn’t happen, including three with more than 62).

It’s not just a few people. This is thousands of people, more than that, with so many reminding Judge that he was short of Barry Bonds’ 2001 total that the phrase “11 home runs behind” was trending nationally on Twitter the night Aaron Judge hit No. 62. So was “seventh place.”

People wrote these things, thought these things, like they’re the smart ones. But then, dumb never knows it’s dumb. Dumb will always, literally, be the last to know.

The safest argument for this side, the side of a cheater, is that, well, everyone in baseball was using steroids; Bonds, McGwire and Sosa were just better at it. Those were the parameters in that era. That was the playing field, and it was level, because everyone cheated. Or almost everyone. People I respect, I mean baseball people I've known for years and count as friends, consider Bonds the HR king.

Their argument, I guess: If nobody has integrity, does integrity even matter?

People contort themselves into pretzels to believe what they want. Babe Ruth, for example, played before baseball’s integration, so some ask: How legitimate are the 60 home runs he hit in 1927, or the 714 home runs he hit overall? Never mind that Ruth had nothing to do with segregation, didn’t make the rules.

The arguments against Maris' 61 homers in 1961 are 162 games, not 154, or an asterisk, or “greenies,” those green-coated amphetamine pills some players took decades ago to lift their focus and energy over the course of a long season. What’s that? You’re saying there’s no proof Maris took greenies?

You’re not paying attention: Proof doesn’t matter anymore.

What matters is what we want to believe. So much has been taken from us, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, but if we went back in time and kept insisting they were real, even as we grew old enough to know better, Santa and the Tooth Fairy would still be real today.

This is not a mistake some people are willing to make anymore, whether it’s home-run seasons that never happened or big lies that have been disproven or whatever. People believe what they want, latching onto deceit or corruption, becoming deceitful and corrupt in the process.

The empty conversation about Aaron Judge’s HR legitimacy is not as serious as the actual problems affecting the world. Not even close. Most of us understand that. But the empty conversation, the need to push Aaron Judge below Barry Bonds, is a symptom of where we are heading as more and more people believe what they want, not what is real.

Because growing up is hard.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.

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This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Aaron Judge is HR king; Bonds, McGwire, Sosa are cheating frauds