I hope our 7 inexplicably stalling at Bliss Street in Queens is some kind of sign that we'll have more nights like this one. Well, maybe not so much with (switch to Prof. Frink voice) the cold and the blowing and the mist and the brrrr, but with the beating the Nationals and the Floyd bomb and the Piazza productive groundout and the Glavine. It was only last year, I just found out, that the MTA restored the name Bliss to the 46th Street stop. So maybe that's a sign that we can look forward to more of that sort of thing -- the bliss -- as the season progresses.

Weather kept down the crowd. ThunderStix didn't make much of a ruckus, save for the lone souse in our row, and I think that was him knocking his head against his bottle of Bud. Shea being Shea, I assume they handed out one stick per customer. "Ya like noise? Bring yer own!" You'll recall ThunderStix were all the rage at the 2002 World Series. It is now 2005. Next week, the trend-conscious Mets will lure kids by giving away Pogo Sticks (though they won't stop at this floor).

Didja catch the Clydesdales and the Anheuser eagle in the parking lot? All that animal action must've scared King Felix and the feral cats from making their nightly rounds. Usually they're out to tailgate by 6:30.

I'm surprised Glavine gets as much support as he does in these parts. We sat a couple of rows behind a fellow in a GLAVINE 47 shirt. I wanted to ask, what, were they out of ROACH 57? It's not so much that I consider him a Brave as that I know he's still Glavine. I've been told both that he's a decent guy and that he's a total jerk. I have a hard time believing one of those. As long as he's paid to don our duds, I wish him success and safe cab rides. The second he takes them off, I don't really care what happens to him.

At the moment, I feel the same way about Al Leiter. Pity. He was our front man for so long that it feels petty to dump on him. He really did care about being a Met, about getting 100 Met wins, about being mentioned in the same Met breath with Jerry Koosman. (I'm certain that if he ever stumbled upon our One Hundred Greatest Mets ranking of him, he'd give me an earful; "28? 28? Behind Kingman? C'mon, I'm greater than Kingman!"). Yet there's something about Al departing that set off the sense of relief you'd see in an '80s teen movie, specifically the scene in which the popular kids who ran the school finally got theirs from the supposed nerds. Old-Timers Day 2010, Al won't get booed. Next Marlins start at Shea, he shouldn't count on it.

I wasn't thinking about Glavine's record or Leiter's record when I bid you adieu at 11:05, emerged into the din of Penn Station at 11:06 and decided, à la Timo, to not run full-out to catch the 11:07. I was thinking of my own record. For the third time ever, I'm 3-0 to start a season. It's happened twice before, in 1998 and 2000. After my fourth game those years, I was 3-1. In what they call a quick turnaround, I'm due back at Shea early Saturday afternoon to try to scale Mount Fourandoh for the first time ever. They say it might rain. They say it might Seo. I kinda hope it rains.

I'd like to soak up a little more of tonight's bliss before going back into battle. By pinging from Shea to Penn to Long Island, I got an additional treat. As both home teams were indeed home, there was a convergence of fans waiting for the LIRR. Mets fans. Yankees fans. We looked happy. They didn't. Shortly before the 11:36 was called, a couple of fellow travelers walked by wearing gear in the same family as mine. "METS!" they said. "METS!" I answered. We slapped palms. We knocked fists. We went public with our bliss. A Yankees fan standing nearby had nothing to say and nobody to knock. We won. They lost.

It was worth the extended commute.

Well, it was good seeing you in the realworldosphere, back in the big blue junkpile. I must admit that new Diamondvision is awfully impressive, and while the Nathan's hot dogs aren't even in the same ballpark (ahem) as the ones at Keyspan, they're a lot better than the ones from Pyongyang Collective Snout Factory #5 Brand, or whatever that was that was foisted upon us in years before.

Shea being Shea, it did have its share of strange sights, such as rain swirling sideways through the sky and not appearing to actually fall, elevator doors with a sign that says ELEVATOR DOES NOT STOP ON THIS FLOOR (so many questions), and Tom Glavine on the mound with nothing terrible happening to him.

Sometime this spring I had an unhappy realization: Every time something bad befalls Glavine on the mound, I feel ashamed, almost like I should be apologizing to him. And so many bad things have happened to him during his time here -- a total lack of offense, bad bullpen work, horrid defense. You name it, it's happened to Tom Glavine.

But here's the thing: I don't feel like cringing when something happens to Trachsel, or Heilman, or Pedro or Zambrano or anybody else. Just Glavine. And ultimately, I've realized, that's not a compliment. It's the opposite, in fact: It's an admission that going into the third year of his time here, I still don't regard him as One Of Us. And from the impatience fans have always showed with him at Shea, I think most Met fans feel the same way.

But why? He chose us, didn't he?

It's not the obvious things. It's not that he's a mercenary -- once that first free-agent period rolls around, they're nearly all mercenaries. I realized that and got over it sometime during the Reagan administration. It's not that I still think of him as an Atlanta Brave and therefore as the enemy, though all those years of seeing him throttle us didn't help. No, it's something else.

Somehow he's just never seemed to fit in here. He's invisible in the newspapers, in a way a top-flight starter and probable Hall of Famer shouldn't be, not in New York. Who remembers anything he's done or said, except for rumblings that he was part of the Leiter/Franco kitchen cabinet and his losing his teeth in a taxicab accident? (I know, I said that and yet we're killing Leiter because he can't keep his mouth shut. Fans suck.) On the mound he's aloof, expressionless and somehow apart -- something I do remember from his Atlanta days, usually in conjunction with him staring at Javy Lopez after Javy had managed to screw up a bunt or put his shinguards on backwards or get a ball stuck in his ear or some other numbnuts Javy Lopez thing. Maybe it's that having stolen him away from the Braves, he spent too long getting shellacked by them. But if anything, that should have made him more one of us, not less.

I think, ultimately, it dates back to his countdown to 300 wins and the creeping realization that by coming to New York, he'd blown his shot at it. That's embarrassing, especially since I think we all know he'd have gotten there if he'd stayed in Atlanta. (Personally, I can't understand why he didn't go to Boston, but that's another post.) It comes down to thinking that we cost him 300 wins, that we let him down, that he'd have been better off never putting on our uniform. Which is a we that somehow doesn't include Tom Glavine.

And if he's still outside that we in his third season, he's probably not ever coming in. It's strange. Glavine's always competed, never malingered, thrown a one-hitter for us, and otherwise done his best for a bad team in the face of Questec and advancing age and plain old bad luck. And yet we've never warmed up to him and probably never will. So what happened? Did we reject him? Did he reject us? Did we reject him because we thought he was rejecting us? Like many a bad relationship, the only answer is that we'll never find the answer -- beyond knowing, with a certain chagrined bafflement, that we never should have gotten together in the first place.