This should bother me. It doesn't.

This should be terrible. It isn't.

This should feel...not like it does.

I'm at peace tonight. There is nothing more I can do, nothing more I can say, nothing more I can even think.

It's over. I knew it would be over eventually. I didn't know how it would end but if I had to guess, this is how I would've figured.

The Mets would go to Atlanta desperately needing to win one game. And they would lead. At the same time, the top team they were chasing would have to lose. And they would trail.

Then both games would reverse themselves. Billy Wagner, with nobody on and two out in the ninth, would allow two infield singles and a three-run homer to Craig Biggio. Done. And Braden Looper would find a way to let the Braves win a game they had trailed for 8-1/2 innings.

I have to admit Loop surprised me by only allowing Atlanta to tie the game. His teammates also heartened me with their insistence on taking a tenth-inning lead.

But I wasn't fooled, not really. There were just too many Braves and too many Mets on that field for this to Turn out any different than it did.

Blame Looper? Takatsu? Randolph? Wright for getting doubled off? Beltran for getting thrown out stealing? Cameron for playing right like it was center? Piazza for aging? Ishii for taking unnecessary starts from Seo? Bill Shea for not convincing the Reds to move to New York in 1958?

Whoever. Whatever. This was going to happen at some point, this not winning the Wild Card, not making the playoffs. If it was going to happen anywhere, it might as well happen where it did. It was a dependable outcome if nothing else.

The Braves swept the Mets at Turner Field when the Mets could not afford to lose there.

My watch is set to within a nanosecond of dead-on balls accuracy.

Twenty-three games to go. I'll watch. I'll write. I'll care. But I'll no longer believe. Not this year.

Peace, man.

I won't claim that this is an original sentiment in Met Land tonight, but here it is anyway: Should we ever again hold a lead in the 9th inning, I want to see Roberto Hernandez coming out of the bullpen.

I don't care what it does to the 8th inning. I don't care if it exposes Aaron Heilman, or forces Juan Padilla into a setup role he's not ready for, or ruins the feng shui of Flushing dim sum shops, or causes hermaphroditism in frogs. I don't care.

Because I cannot stand watching Braden Looper blow ballgames anymore.

Braden Looper can't get lefties out on any night, and on many nights he can't get anyone out. His 9th inning of work tonight now only doesn't look disgustingly incompetent because it was instantly followed by his more disgustingly incompetent 10th inning of work. (Gee Willie, that stove wasn't much cooler the second time you touched it, was it?) The difference between Braden Looper and Armando Benitez? Braden Looper's name is sillier.

Now, Braden Looper is far from the only thing wrong with this team. I'm not claiming it's all on him. Heck, score one, two, or three runs a night and you're going nowhere even if you, say, get great starting pitching consistently. But Braden Looper is clearly one of the things consistently wrong with this team, and his era needs to end starting right now. Bert for the rest of the year, now once again recast as a dispiriting quest to stay over .500. And then?

Well, let's put it this way: All I want for Christmas is Billy Wagner.

At the end of the 1998 season, a moment in time that I seem to be referencing quite a bit lately, I came to a decision:

I would no longer be a baseball fan.

I started by not watching or listening to, other than to get a score, the Giants-Cubs playoff game that determined the winner of the Wild Card, the prize that we held at the beginning of the final week of the season and one that we squandered across a five-game, curtain-closing losing streak.

Didn't watch that game. Only nibbled at the post-season. Gave up on the World Series in the middle of Game Two. I just didn't have it in me anymore. I pictured myself becoming one of those codgers you run into, the ones who tell you they haven't watched a game since O'Malley left Brooklyn. No interest whatsoever in following the Mets again.

Ya see how that took.

I had that feeling coming on down the stretch in '99 when it when it appeared to be déjà blew all over again, but the Mets put an end to that by turning everything around and in fact immersing me more deeply in baseball in a way than I ever was or probably could be again. In 2001, after 9/11, I didn't think a silly game could ever hold any meaning for me, but as I've mentioned before, a pennant race can do wonders for one's concept of what's important.

I'm back to not giving a damn.

OK, I give a damn to the extent that it bothers me that I don't give a damn, but all at once, after losing the second straight to Atlanta and eight of the last ten at the absolute worst juncture to do something like that, I'm strangely numb tonight. Once the game was over and I knew we were four out (and after I confirmed that the Devil Rays had done their part for humanity), I couldn't watch any other baseball, not live games, not highlights. I didn't want to know that there were fourteen clubs besides the Braves that were happy tonight. I didn't want to know that baseball was being played to the satisfaction of anybody.

It would be bad enough to lose eight out of ten -- it was bad enough to lose six out of eight -- but why the Braves? Why always the Braves? They're good, I grant you, but they're not that good. Nobody's rightly 53-20 good over somebody else for nine years in one place. It's beyond being fodder for darkly cynical amusement. It's insulting and dispiriting and horrible. Not New Orleans horrible, but pretty awful for something that's supposed to serve as a diversion.

When I'm watching a game from my couch and something goes dramatically wrong for the Mets, I tend to make a fist with my right hand and punch the middle cushion. The cushion has lost a great deal of its firmness since August 27. Just hearing the name "Marcus Giles" during the post-game incited gratuitous violence against innocent furniture.

Alas, that couch hasn't absorbed the last of me. Despite my swelling discord and hardening dismay regarding our team, I expect to be sitting on my ass at 7 o'clock Wednesday night watching baseball being played in Atlanta. Let's hope the Mets aren't doing the exact same thing.