"Patriots defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth could be lost for the season before he even puts on his game-day cleats if the veteran quarterback-sacker is convicted of groping a Washington, D.C., cocktail waitress and gets the maximum six months behind bars for the misdemeanor sex abuse charge.

Haynesworth, 30, will suit up and be seated at the defense team's table when his trial kicks off tomorrow in the District of Columbia's Superior Court, his attorney, A. Scott Bolden, confirmed.

Bolden declined to say if he will put No. 92 on the witness stand. The waitress, an unidentified college student, claims that Haynesworth — during a private Feb. 13 party at the P.O.V. Lounge atop Washington's posh W Hotel — fondled the coed's breast after slipping his debit card into her bra to cover his $811 tab, while her hands were full of dishes. Haynesworth was still with the Redskins at the time.

In eleventh-hour legal scrimmaging, Bolden is battling to throw out what he calls "irrelevant and highly inflammatory" statements Haynesworth allegedly made to Metropolitan Police Department detectives about the waitress hours after the incident and allegedly without having been read his rights.

"I know what this is about, she is just upset I have a white girlfriend," Haynesworth told police. "I couldn't even tell you the last time I dated a black girl. She was trying to get with me.""