Tonight, as promised, I watched two episodes of "The Wire" on TiVo.

People in St. Louis watched it rain. We checked in various places to verify that that's what it was doing.

Tom Glavine had his usual fourth day of rest. So did Jeff Weaver. The Cardinals' bullpen took it easy too.

Willie Randolph offered crumbs of platitudes to a hungry press corps, then said something else entirely to his troops. Tony La Russa pondered the intricacies of, say, lefty-righty matchups when up or down 13 runs. If he wasn't playing some six-dimensional game of eeny-meeny with his baseball cards of Weaver and Chris Carpenter.

Postal workers moved packages of FAITH AND FEAR t-shirts through our nation's mail system. A couple have even arrived at their new homes.

Cliff Floyd's Achilles got slightly better. So did Albert Pujols' hamstring and Scott Rolen's shoulder.

El Duque thought about Willis Reed.

Tigers scouts groused and grumbled and went up in the Gateway Arch or something.

Baseball fans in two cities (and lots of kindred souls outside them) waited and analyzed and argued and fussed and fretted and sighed.

Well, it was the night for it. Now, finish whatever you're doing, get into bed, and get some sleep. Because the weather report for Missouri tomorrow night is favorable, with a 100% chance of tension. We've got at least two days of baseball played full throttle, maybe three.

And this weekend? Either winter will have come down like a hammer, or we'll be off on one final mission: to storm the gates of Baseball Heaven.

Rest up.

Rain, rain wouldn't go away. Game postponed. They play tomorrow night. Glavine, better rested versus a better rested Weaver or, for all we know, a three-day Carpenter. Maybe La Russa, that genius, will pitch Spiezio.

Got a presser on SNY right now. St. Louis writers say "we" a lot and refer to Cardinal players by first name. One just asked about "Yadier," as if the questioner were Jose or Bengie.

About these press conferences, here are the questions, generally:

"Were you thinking something I might be thinking when you accomplished that thing on the field?"
"Do you believe what just happened will completely alter the series let alone the course of the Western world?"
"Can you keep from rolling your eyes while I ask something immensely irrelevant?"

Snigh still supposed to have Post Season Live on later. Tim Teufel looks like me in every science class I ever took. Please don't call on me. Please don't call on me.

In the meantime, Josh...I mean Danny looks to save the world...I mean a TV show at 10 o'clock tonight on The West Wing...I mean Studio 60.

The Carloses are a beautiful thing, aren't they? ¡Nosotros Carlamos! We are them and they are us and we are all together...goo goo g'joob.

Yet they're not Ollie and Ollie, saviors in arms.

Yeah, that's who it figured to hinge on. All the series previews in print and on air had it exactly as it's happened: Darren Oliver eating up innings in Game Three and Oliver Perez giving up solo homers in Game Four. Those were the keys to the pennant all along.

Nobody saw it coming, but that — without discounting any of the dozen delightful Met runs still crossing the plate — now defines why glee is outpointing glum in Metsopotamia. Oliver surrendered no earned runs in a loss. Perez absorbed five in a win. And somehow it's all good.

Welcome to your narrative-free National League Championship Series. Forget that claptrap about momentum and the next day's starting pitcher. The last night's starting pitcher threw as pedestrian a 5 and two-thirds as you're going to see and, in context, it was magnificent. The appeal of Perez was that he could go out and potentially blow hitters away. He didn't. He didn't have to. He pitched with the poise of a veteran who had been in the Majors for more than a dozen years.

Check that. He pitched better than Steve Trachsel.

I'll admit my faith in Oliver Perez was well veiled — "folly" is what I believe I said it would be to count on him — but getting proven wrong is often the best part about being a nervous-nelly baseball fan. This isn't about being right. This is about being happy. And we're happy this morning. Twenty-four hours ago, we were blogging virtual suicide notes. Today we're either seeding clouds over St. Louis (rest Glavine!) or spreading a tarp across Missouri (the bats...the bats...the bats are on fire!).

Whatever. There's no legitimate pegging of this series. We have seen four contests, none of which has resembled the other three.

Game One? A taut pitching duel determined on a single swing.
Game Two? A seesaw slugfest.
Game Three? A suffocating shutout.
Game Four? A slambang beatdown by those that done been whitewashed the night before.
Game Five? I'unno.

So let 'em play tonight or let 'em wait. The Mets and the Cardinals have left few clues as to what comes next.

Whew!

The series is even, and no matter what happens, the Mets are coming back to New York alive.

You saw it. We all saw it. Really, this rebound began last night, when Darren Oliver saved the bullpen from having to put in overtime. It continued tonight, with the other Oliver (young Mr. Perez) pitching bravely and effectively. Never mind his numbers, which got a little blemished late as he was trading potential runs for outs -- he did exactly what we needed him to do, exactly what Steve Trachsel was utterly incapable of doing, and now things are different.

Did the worm turn tonight? Only the baseball gods can say. But diving into baseball phrenology, it should be noted that since the seventh inning of Game 2 the Cardinals have most certainly had The Look -- big hits from the guys you tend to look past (Encarnacion, Spiezio and Molina), homers from unlikely sources (Taguchi and Eckstein), pitchers hitting homers, young relievers coming up big, two-run triples everywhere, and lots of balls eluding Met gloves by inches (Green in Game 2, Green and Chavez in Game 3, Beltran and Wright early tonight).

But tonight was different: Those young relievers weren't so good and the Cards' fielding fell apart. And, of course, the Met bats erupted. This was no "save some of that for tomorrow night" -- this was wanting hitting to get contagious, for everyone in the lineup to leave with a knock, for all concerned to freaking relax already. Mission accomplished -- the nicest sight for me wasn't Jose Valentin's casket-closing double, but the way he raised his fist and grinned afterwards. When the Mets took the field, the wolf was at the door. Three and a half hours later, he'd fled into the woods yelping that the monsters were out of the cage.

Now, time to keep the furry little blighter there.

My fondest hope for tomorrow night? It has nothing to do with baseball. It's that we spend tomorrow watching "Prison Break" or "Justice" or whatever it is Fox has as a backup plan. (I'd be catching up with "The Wire" on TiVo, but you get the idea.) The weather report for Monday night is apocalyptic, and that's just fine with me. If it rains, Glavine pitches Tuesday night on normal rest. Same for Jeff Weaver, but short rest is more dangerous for a touch-and-feel guy like Glavine than for a winger-flinger like Weaver.

After that? Well -- and this is a case where you do need to look ahead -- if Glavine prevails in Game 5 (on normal rest or not), the Cardinals need Carpenter to beat Maine and Suppan to beat [Oliver or Oliver or Trachsel] at Shea. If Game 5 goes to St. Louis, we need our rotation's soft underbelly to put together two good games against the Cardinals' ace and a guy who shut us down Saturday. Or for the hopefully still-uncaged monsters to run wild, eating wolves and birds and anything else that gets within reach, of course. But solid pitching from unexpected sources would sure help, and that could well be too much to ask down 3-2, Shea or no Shea.

Funny thing, hoping to spend Monday night doing whatever the hell I do when there isn't baseball.