I won't be at Game Seven tonight, but my stomach is already on a train and my heart is running on the express track.

Next stop...well, we'll find out pretty soon, won't we?

I like Willie Randolph. He said the extent of his pre-Game Six pep talk was to go over travel plans for Detroit. Nice. Willie's been a winner all his life (or haven't you heard?).

I haven't been a winner all my life, but I was very early on. My first experience with baseball was as a winner: six years old, 1969, on top of the world. There was nothing about it that suggested it was to be expected, so I didn't and it wasn't. I've only had three more cracks at it since then and only one that came through all the way.

But this is where I came in, a Mets fan whose team was going to the World Series. That's home for me. That is where I want to go again, that is where we are too close to not get to now. Starting late Tuesday night — that was Game Five if, like me, you've lost all concept of days of the week — the greatest thing there could be was Game Seven, specifically its existence. I've never been to a Game Seven. Most Mets fans haven't. I don't have to be there tonight. As long as the Mets are, that's sufficient.

Technically, the rules are the same as yesterday. Lose yesterday and it would be over. But yesterday was about survival. Today is Game Seven. We win and we go on to greater things. We lose and we don't, just like yesterday, but we're not thinking that way anymore, are we? It's both not as bad and a whole lot worse.

Yesterday I threw everything I had at survival, all my Faith, even the No. 41 throwback jersey I was given as a gift eleven years ago, something I'd never worn to Shea before last night because I didn't want to spill anything on it. I guess really I was just saving it up. I don't know that I have any clothing, any lyrics, any stats, any gimmicks anymore. I just have my team in Game Seven. We're both home.

And I don't intend on losing again.

As we endeavor to complete our 62nd two-game winning streak — and execute our 104th one-game winning streak — of 2006, I think I've finally figured out the deal with this team, specifically why every win has us staking out prime viewing spots on Lower Broadway and every loss has us dissecting traffic patterns on the Whitestone Bridge (should I jump or just lie down in the center lane?).

When these Mets win, they look so damn unbeatable that you can't imagine they'll ever lose. And when these Mets lose, they look so hopeless, you can't fathom that they'll ever win.

For eight innings of Game Six, it seemed impossible that our lovable juggernaut of pitching, defense, timely hitting, crafty baserunning and leadoff homers could technically still be playing its final ball of the year. Of course we were going to win this sixth game. Of course there was going to be a seventh game. I stopped my of courses there out of respect for protocol, but I could connect the dots.

In the top of the ninth, I realized the season could very well be over in a matter of seconds — and no wonder.

We suck!
We can't get anybody out!
Why didn't we score more runs?
Why did we sign this guy for...how many MORE years are we STUCK with him?
COME ON BILLY!!!

I never stood eight innings at Shea Stadium only to end the ninth slumped in my seat as a Met win was secured. I couldn't stand and I couldn't cheer. After spending the preceding 24 hours doing my Metsian best to Believe, I couldn't believe we actually won.

A hundred fifty dollars for that?

Good deal.

Prorated for each Cardinal out and Met run, each of our tickets cost $4.84 per definitively happy element, a bargain at any price if you consider only the contextual thrill of victory and ignore the agony of debit. I'm trying to overlook that earlier in this decade, I paid five bucks to sit in the very same upper deck for an entire game, but it's hard to argue that that version of Met baseball and this version Met baseball are anything but distant relations.

Closer in resemblance across the pages of our family album are these Mets and my favorite Mets, those of 1999. I thought of them at Woodside around midnight as I awaited the Babylon train. The '99 team took a more circuitous route to the postseason than this one but it got exactly as far entering last night. They fought their way to a Game Six of an NLCS, still the most incredible baseball game I ever watched, representing both the climax and denouement of the most intense month I've ever been a part of as a baseball fan. It took me more than five years to stop thinking about that season's horrifyingly wonderful stretch drive and that postseason's dips, climbs and ultimate drop, especially that Game Six, in a continually recurring loop. My life felt defined by the 1999 Mets until Omar and Willie gave me a present which to fully concern myself.

I never got over not so much Kenny Rogers and Ball Four to Andruw Jones, but the lack of a Game Seven in 1999 and what that would have wrought. Rick Reed was going to best Tom Glavine, and the Mets were going to stick it to the Yankees immediately thereafter...I can't prove it but I know it. 2000 was finer and dandier in terms of bottom-line success, but it never eased the justmissiveness of '99. Every grim Met thing that followed 2000 served to enlarge the shadow cast by the Game Seven that was never played.

Last night we won Game Six. It wasn't an epic out of 1999. There was no comeback from 0-5 or 3-7 or a stunning laser to right-center by one future Hall of Famer off another future Hall of Famer (though I'm beginning to like Jose's chances). This duel did not require a tenth or eleventh inning and it steered blessedly clear of Turner Field. It wasn't nearly as awesome an NLCS Game Six as the last NLCS Game Six we were in. But oh boy was it better.

Seven years after we missed Game Seven, I came home after we finally made it there. The most recent message in my e-mail queue (filled otherwise with Wagnerian groans) was an invitation from an online wine seller to purchase a new release: Freemark Abbey Bosche Cabernet Sauvignon. I sent one friend one tiny bottle of champagne one time (to replace the one he had confiscated somewhere one month ago) and now I'm on their list. I delete these e-mails as a matter of course, but this time I did a double take.

The vintage they were selling was 1999.

Well, I'm not buying the wine (at $150 a playoff pop, I'm barely buying diet cola), but this morning I figuratively toast my Boys of another September and October, in many ways my Boys of Forever — my Fonzie, my Oly, my Mike, my Robin, my Melvin, my Benny, my Reeder, my stubbornly swinging Shawon, my unstoppable Tank, all of my 1999 Mets up to if not quite encompassing Mr. Rogers since I don't want to get too cozy with him just in case we meet again in the very, very near future. I'm remembering the thrills you gave me and the Game Seven you tried so hard to include in that package but couldn't.

We've got that Game Seven now. Exactly seven year later, I can finally move on. As can these Mets any hour now. And they can.

Here's to us then. Here's to us tonight.

As ever in Flushing, our Faith endures.

Wow.

It's possible I've never been so tired.

The email came this morning: Two tickets for tonight's game. $150 each. By the time it got to me it was a decent-length chain of emails, no guarantee the tickets were even still around. And then there was that shocking price tag.

But still.

Emily said she thought I should go. (I love my wife.) So I emailed Greg. I'll go if you go, I waffled pathetically. Then I emailed my pal Bryan in Chicago, whose counsel is always wise. "If they lose," he advised, "it's only money. If they win, and you're not there to see it, you'll regret it for a long, long time."

Only a lot of money, but I found myself nodding as I read that. If they win, I want to be there to see it. If they lose, well, it'll hurt like hell. But the terror of losing already hurts pretty bad. And between this year and this crazy blog, don't I want to see this all the way through? Shouldn't I see them out, if that's what the baseball gods have decreed?

So Greg and I bullied each other into going without admitting that was what we were doing, and a midtown meeting and three Ben Franklins later, there we were around 7:45 at Gate E. Same familiar place of umpteen games over the years, except everything was different, from the arty tickets to the extra security to the hordes of baying fans to the fear and hope and bravado and defiance flying around the stadium.

I don't think I've had better neighbors at a big game. Everybody knew the lineups up and down, knew what to cheer for and paid attention throughout. Our seatmates were intense, funny and ready to high-five everyone in sight whenever called for. Which, happily, was a lot. John Maine pitched the game of his young life, with a huge crowd carrying him along whenever it looked like he might falter. Reyes' opening shot over the wall got the fans going, and they stayed high-decibel all the way to Lo Duca's two badly needed insurance runs. Which were just enough to survive Wagner's rather terrifying high-wire act. (Goddamn, Billy.)

The terror was never gone until Eckstein's grounder wound up safely in Delgado's glove. Between Wagner and the random assassins up and down the Cardinals' order and the sheer fickleness of postseason baseball, 1-0 and 2-0 and 4-0 felt like the decimal point needed to be slid over to the left. And when I wasn't chattering nervously at Greg, I found myself doing something rather strange for me: I joined in each and every silly Shea entertainment and scoreboard exhortation. I clap, clap, clapped my hands when ordered to do so. I changed to the scoreboard's "Jose Jose Jose" cadence even though we were doing just fine singing by ourselves. I went to the window, opened it, stuck my head out and yelled "LET'S GO METS!" I cheered for the Kiss Cam. I sang the anthem and "God Bless America" and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and "Meet the Mets" and "Sweet Caroline" and "Enter Sandman." I even offered the Pepsi Party Patrol a golf clap. If they'd had the pizza-delivery race, I would have cheered for the red truck. (OK, I ignored "Lazy Mary." Even I have my limits.) I usually pay no attention to whatever Diamondvision is doing between innings, but if this were the last night of baseball at Shea in 2006, I was going to soak up every fun, terrifying, triumphant, goofy bit of it.

But of course it wouldn't be the last night of baseball at Shea in 2006. Because half of the hard business has been done. Now, it's Oliver Perez and a cast of everybody else, against Jeff Suppan, for all the marbles. Game 7. Winner goes to Detroit. Loser goes home.

None of us knows what will happen, except all of us know this: It's another night of October baseball. Another day of tension, of worrying and waiting and wondering, followed by three or four hours of emotion blasting out of a fire hose, followed by being staggeringly exhausted but too keyed up to sleep. To be repeated as long as you're allowed to do so.

For two weeks I've stumbled through my job, through mornings getting the kid to school, doing everything on autopilot until 8:19 comes within view. My eyeballs hurt, I'm grinding my teeth, my ears are ringing, and my voice is completely shredded, reduced to something between a croak and a bark. And the second you catch yourself wondering if you can do it anymore is the same second you find yourself desperately hoping, pleading and beseeching to be allowed another day of it.

Well, we got the day. And now the thing we want most is to be given another week of stumbling and staggering and worrying and waiting.

Sleep? Being able to talk? Being a decent employee? Dude. C'mon. That's what November's for.