Finale or just intermission?

The saga of James "Whitey" Bulger and the Boston office of the FBI is the longest running reality show, a drama about a corrupt relationship spanning four decades. It has outlasted "The Godfather" movies, "The Sopranos" on TV, and left more bodies in its wake than any of those fictional paeans to wise guys.

And today, in a courtroom in Miami, either it ends or it begins again.

It ends if Judge Stanford Blake gives John Connolly a sentence that is anything short of life in prison.

It begins again if Connolly gets life and realizes the only way he doesn't die in prison is if he rolls on those who helped, encouraged, or winked at him all those years that he and the rest of the FBI's organized crime squad allowed Whitey and Stephen Flemmi to commit wholesale murder and mayhem.

Connolly has been locked up for six years, the last three of them as a guest of the state of Florida, where every day he gets a tuna sandwich for lunch. Whatever you think of Connolly, he has borne his fate with an extraordinary stoicism, a mental toughness that is rare among those who know that becoming a government witness comes with a get-out-of-jail card. He has endured his incarceration with the will of someone who either believes desperately in his own innocence or is psychologically incapable of accepting that he did anything wrong. He has always believed that someday, somehow, he will be vindicated.

Finally freed, he could hook up with his old pal, Joe Pistone, the FBI agent whose ability to infiltrate the mob ended up on the silver screen, with Johnny Depp playing him in "Donnie Brasco." There would be a triumphant return to Southie. They could hold the time at Amrheins, or maybe the yuppified makeover of Triple O's bar, where Whitey put bags over people's heads and menaced debtors with the knife he kept in a sheath strapped to his calf.

This is the dream of the delusional. Two separate juries have heard and accepted the evidence against Connolly: one in Boston, where the fruits of his labor led to shallow graves, and one in Miami, where jurors who don't know anything about the peculiarities of this tribal town declared it is wrong for an FBI agent to help gangsters kill people.

Last month, moments after he was convicted of his role in the 1982 execution of John Callahan, Connolly stood at the defendant's rail, vowing to fight on. He thinks he can get a new trial.

The FBI and the Justice Department no doubt are hoping Connolly does get a new trial. Because if he does, it will allow the charade that John Connolly is the only one who should be on trial to continue. The rogue agent theory - that Connolly somehow single-handedly allowed Whitey Bulger to run amok as a favor to the gangster's brother, and his mentor, Billy Bulger - is nonsense. Just on the evidence already in the public domain, the Justice Department could seek indictments of a half-dozen agents and supervisors.

"Do you know what really bothers me?" Tom Foley asked yesterday. "I don't think the FBI or the Justice Department has learned one thing after all this. They're not sorry it happened. They're sorry they got caught."

When he wore the badge of the Massachusetts State Police, Foley did as much as anyone to see that Whitey saw justice. Like other honest cops, Foley got burned by dishonest ones. He and his team built the 1995 indictment that Whitey got tipped about. Then, with Whitey on the lam, Foley helped build the cases that landed Connolly in the dock.

If he is disillusioned, Tom Foley can still appreciate irony.

"If Whitey didn't run," he said, "they'd all have done their time and been out by now. Whitey, Stevie, all of them, they'd be on the street. And John Connolly would be, too."

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com