The Spygate saga, which has dragged on for eight months, may be coming to an end soon.

On Tuesday morning, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell will have his highly anticipated meeting with former New England Patriots employee Matt Walsh at the league offices in New York City. Afterward, Goodell will hold a news conference detailing what Walsh told him; Walsh and his attorney, Michael Levy, have been invited and are expected to attend.

To prepare for the meeting, Goodell had Walsh submit the videos he owned from his days as a video assistant with the team earlier this week; there were eight tapes submitted.

While the videos contained recordings from six games during the 2000 through 2002 seasons, there was nothing on them that New England and coach Bill Belichick hadn’t already owned up to doing, which is taping opposing coaches send in defensive signals.

And there was no “smoking gun,” in the form of recordings from the St. Louis Rams’ final walk-through before Super Bowl XXXVI; it has long been speculated that Walsh made such a tape at the Louisiana Superdome in February 2002.

After protracted negotiations, the league came to an agreement with Walsh and Levy over the conditions under which he’d agree to talk late last month. The meeting is set for 7:30 a.m. on Tuesday.

The trio will then head to the Intercontinental Hotel for the news conference, which will start no earlier than 10 a.m. but is contingent on the meeting conclusion between Goodell and Walsh.

Later that day, Walsh and Levy are set to fly to Washington, D.C. to meet with Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), who has questioned Goodell about why he destroyed the tapes New England submitted during the league’s initial investigation into the club’s illegal videotaping last September.

On Thursday, when it became clear that Walsh did not have a tape containing the Rams’ walk-through and thus this matter would likely end with no further sanctions against New England, Specter released a statement.

“I think it is very unfortunate that the NFL has already started its ‘nothing new’ spin before watching the tapes or finding out what Mr. Matt Walsh has to say. Let’s see where the evidence leads,” it said.

The day before this year’s Super Bowl, the Boston Herald, citing an anonymous source, published a story saying that a member of the Pats’ video staff stayed behind after New England’s walk-through and filmed the Rams’ walk-through.

The Patriots pulled off one of the biggest upsets in NFL history the next day, winning their first championship, 20-17.

New England issued a statement the day the story published saying the claims were “absolutely false. Any suggestion to the contrary is untrue.”

While it is impossible to know what effect, if any, the story had on the Pats’ play in Super Bowl XLII, in which their dream of the league’s first undefeated season sine 1971 was ended by the New York Giants, fans of the team were outraged at the timing of it as well as the implication that the three titles the team has won are in some way tarnished.

Numerous media outlets had been trying to get Walsh’s story since the Spygate story broke in September; he did speak on the record with the New York Times and espn.com earlier this year. While he implied that he may know something, he stopped short of providing any details.

At the NFL’s annual meeting in Florida last month, Belichick again strongly denied the walk-through taping allegation and said he has never ordered such a recording to be made, nor has he ever seen a tape of an opponents’ walk-through. Walsh, now an assistant pro at a Hawaii golf course, had his July 2004 marriage to Rhode Island native Colleen Kennedy profiled in The Providence Journal. In it, Walsh claimed to be an “area scout” for the team, but that is untrue. Belichick has said he couldn’t pick Walsh out of a lineup.

Now 31, Walsh was fired from the Patriots in January 2003. Vice president of player personnel Scott Pioli told the Boston Globe that Walsh had secretly taped conversations between himself and Pioli, and that discovery led to his dismissal.

smanza@projo.com