The inaugural Faith and Fear in Flushing shirt order has been placed -- and soon a big box of shirts will arrive at Jace's house. Yay! Gulp!

Thanks to everybody who said they wanted a shirt. In the next day or so we'll send you all a note asking for a mailing address and telling you how/where to send payment. (In most cases, the shirts will cost $16 delivered -- those of you with bulk orders or who live in exotic locales, we'll figure it out.) If you've had a change of heart, no hard feelings -- life is an uncertain business, and we'll understand if a shirt seemed like a good idea a couple of weeks ago but now not so much. Just let us know when we contact you. Otherwise, we're hoping the shirts will be in your hands within three weeks or so.

That said, a plea: We're a pair of crazy bloggers, not an e-commerce company. We're going to have a frightening number of packages to bring to the post office. And it's October and the team we all love is one of the four left standing.

We'll do our best, and we promise we'll make everybody happy, at least as far as shirts are concerned. (We can't help with calves, Achilles tendons or the outcome of sporting events.) But please remember we're way out of our element here, and be patient with us if you can.

And now back to putting the hoodoo on Albert Pujols and the Cardinals....

So, New Springfield's looking pretty good now, isn't it, with our ample parking and daily Who concerts.
—Mayor Homer Simpson

Probably no need to stoke these fires, but it's a long way from here to Wednesday at 8:20 PM, so what the hell?

I was listening to the FAN all through the overnight, a program devoted to Yankee grumbling, not Met exuding. As Jason said, fine with me. Let 'em gripe to high heavens, let 'em insist their truck must be backed up, let 'em beseech their PTB to switch drivers, let 'em bury those 35 homers and 121 ribbies they got from their third baseman. Let 'em get it out of their systems 'cause that's all they've got now. We've got games coming up.

But one thing, I think, bears noting. I heard a surprising plurality of the callers exclaim, "I'm embarrassed to be a Yankees fan."

As well as you should be. But not because your team lost a playoff series.

This seems as good a moment as any to play the moral superiority card, so let's do it.

You're embarrassed to be a fan of your team? Then what the fuck kind of fan are you? Because as long as I've been a fan of the team I'm a fan of, I have never been embarrassed to be that fan.

Disgusted by my team's performance? Sure.
Annoyed by my team's decisions? Repeatedly.
Humiliated by my team's actions? Occasionally.
Depressed by my team's failures? Sometimes for years on end.

But embarrassed? Never. That's my team and I'm their fan. That's it. That's how it works. One devastating postseason series loss does not embarrass the fan out of you. Even if you've watched your team be eliminated...oh...six consecutive years, you do not become embarrassed by them. They suck? You suck...it up. It's part of the social contract.

If it's not for you, then it's not for you, in which case there's no law saying you have to stick with it. That's not an altogether dishonorable option. If your values system operates in a manner that tells you that a string of defeats at the worst possible instant is making your life more miserable than you can imagine the hypothetical down-the-road payoff being wonderful, then quit. If you can't view a few bad breaks now as a small price to pay for everything excellent you received then, give it up. You don't have to be a fan. There are other things to do with your life. Go do them. Enjoy.

But if you're going to stick with it, stick with it. Be mad, be sad, but don't be "embarrassed" by what or who you are. You called radio stations to crow and strutted down the street in your garb and probably haughted it over a few people who didn't share your particular fandom when it was all going swimmingly. Now that it's not, you can't be "embarrassed" to be that same fan. Don that cap, wrap yourself in that jacket and tell the world you still root for that team of yours, win or — this will shock you — lose.

Otherwise, you're the fraud we always suspected you were.

On the flip side, I heard a few Yankees fans mutter congratulations to the Mets and wish us luck (the good kind) in winning the World Series. They're New Yorkers, they said. Willie deserves it, they said. At least the Mets know how to play the game, they said. Whether they meant it or not, it was fairly gracious. It's more than I ever managed in 1996 when it was de rigueur in some quarters to act that way in the other direction. At the end of that year's October, the Mets took out an ad in one of the papers congratulating the Yankees. I hung it on my office door. If Fred and Nelson could tip their cap, so could I...for about two hours until I got ahold of myself and tore it down.

Now that was embarrassing.

My partner in this blog is an insightful guy. We were at one of the Subway Series games in May when I noticed how little attention our slice of Shea, regardless of affiliation, was paying to this rubber match, the one that was reportedly such a hot ticket, the one all of New York was said to be atwitter over. How, I asked him, can everybody not be glued to their seats — or at least standing in front of them — when so much is riding on this?

"I hate to break it to you," he answered, "but not everybody is a fan the way you are and I am."

Who knew?

There really are such animals as casual fans and bandwagon fans and fans whose interest ebbs and flows. There are people who simply like to get caught up in a phenomenon and people whose curiosity draws them to a crowd and people who have the means to attend Events and buy their way in because it's the thing to do. There are people who can take it or leave it depending on the quality of what it is. There are even people who think it's neat when a team, any team, that plays where they live is successful. Those same people didn't care before and they will drift away soon after.

Mind-boggling, I know, but they're apparently out there. As long as they're pleasant and relatively sincere, I don't mind their participation. Being a part of something bigger than yourself is what a bandwagon is all about, whether you were on the bandwagon when there were plenty of good seats available or whether you're cramming your way onto the last open car (step behind the yellow line — there's another one right behind it approaching the station!).

I'm not going to worry too much about what those who weren't Mets fans before 2006 — especially before Holy Saturday, October 7, 2006 — are thinking as long as I've got the Mets versus the Cardinals or the Mets versus the Padres to worry about. The more the merrier, et al, though I'd certainly prefer some heretofore apathetic ass not be glued to a mezzanine seat that by all rights belongs under one of our orange and blue bottoms. Should what comes next proceed well, we're the ones who will revel the deepest. Should it not, we know the drill. We might be disgusted, annoyed, humiliated or depressed. We might be all of that at once. But we'll never be embarrassed to be Mets fans.

I'd be ashamed of us if we were.

I swear, the headlines on ESPN's baseball page right now read like a two-year-old Onion come to life. Among them:

Report: Torre to be fired, replaced by Piniella
A-Rod: 'I sucked'
Bonderman: Perfect through five...
Law: No fight in Yanks
Mets sweep Dodgers to advance
New York's bullpen slams door late...
Beimel apologizes to teammates for cut hand
Fewer than dozen fans greet dazed Yanks in New York

Then you scroll down for the piece de resistance:

Monday Oct. 2: A Bronx Bash
The Yankees haven't won the World Series since 2000, but they will recapture glory this October. Jayson Stark explains why.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go back to slamming Red Bull so I can stay awake forever and enjoy this.

"All I know is that the only thing they’ll be talking about in the city of New York for the remainder of this season is National League baseball." -- Omar Minaya

Well, no. The Yankees led SportsCenter. Tidings of our doings didn't even arrive until after the first commercial break. WFAN? Wall-to-wall Yankees. Tomorrow's back pages? A split at best.

And incredibly, I couldn't be happier.

Ladies and gentlemen, if ever I'd told you we'd sweep our NLDS opponent and have to compete for the headlines, the reaction would have been ugly. Outrage! Frustration! Betrayal! What story could possibly be bigger than us?

And if I'd told you we'd be beaming about this slight? You'd never, ever, ever have believed it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

By the time Emily and I left the house with our houseguest Pete -- who may not be allowed to leave until Halloween -- and friends Chris (aka the Human Fight) and Peggy along for the ride, Jeremy Bonderman's astonishing demolition of the Yankees was well under way. Getting ready to go out, I flipped over to WCBS and couldn't believe the bitterness. Paul O'Neill opined that the team down below him was panicking. If there'd been an attending physician, I think the diagnosis would have been that John Sterling was in shock. Suzyn Waldman? She sounded like she was going to fling herself out of the pressbox, spitting through clenched teeth that this was worse than getting ousted in the first round by the Angels, worse than the unbelievable 2004 Red Sox comeback. "Total embarrassment," she kept saying. Later, she trudged through a Saab promo like a captured fighter pilot forced to recite an anti-American screed.

Needless to say, I loved every single shocked syllable.

After a hasty dinner we walked into Toad Hall (a Met bar, for anyone who finds themselves near Soho come game time) in time for the final three outs in Detroit and the Tigers' gloriously loopy celebration, complete with Leyland kissing fans and Kenny Rogers (of all people) spraying champagne on fans and cops alike. We soaked it in, chortling. Then it was time to open a tab, put on the colors, relax briefly, and then shelve the undercard and bring on the main event.

My prediction before the game: We wouldn't beat Maddux, but he'd exit after his habitual 70-odd pitches and we'd beat whomever shouldn't have been brought in instead of him. Not exactly. Maddux's location was horrible from the get-go, with Reyes driving his first pitch a long way, Lo Duca getting thrown out at third and Jose Valentin coming within an eyelash of making the score 5-0 before Maddux could find three outs. If anything, he was left in too long: Yes, the top of the fourth was his strongest inning, but he should have been pinch-hit for leading off the bottom of the third. Down 4-0 in an elimination game, and you're giving away an out to start an inning? I don't get it.

Maybe Grady Little was thinking, "Hey, that's Trachsel out there." Which is defensible, because he wasn't much better. Nobody we threw out there before Mota was: Darren Oliver lucked into a double play on a screaming line from Andre Ethier, but then let Jeff Kent (whose every appearance on the TV, I'm pleased to say, elicited a "FUCK YOU, KENT!" from me) tie the game; Chad Bradford was ineffective; and Pedro Feliciano paid homage to Kenny Rogers and the victorious Detroit Tigers by walking in the go-ahead run.

By then it seemed likely this was going to be one of those avert-your-eyes slugfests in which punches would be traded at point-blank range until someone faceplanted into the canvas -- and I was confident the last fighter standing would be us. (Not that this confidence prevented me from wanting to vomit throughout the ninth inning.)

But if this was an ugly game, our indignant uprising just minutes after Feliciano's indiscretion was beautiful. Reyes hammered a hanging curve into center to tie things, Lo Duca sent a little parachute over Furcal's head (from the camera angle, everyone watching on TV anywhere in the world thought the ball had been caught), and Beltran followed with a little doink of his own. Not exactly screamers, but we were off and rolling, all the way to Wagner outlasting the pesky Ramon Martinez and the 10th pitch of that seemingly endless at-bat winding up, deservingly, in Shawn Green's glove.

All the way to the strangest, happiest case of playing second banana I can recall. All the way to one of the happiest days to be a Met fan, ever. Freude of the Schaden- and the plain old variety, all within the same five-hour stretch. I can't wait to wake up and buy every paper in sight and have Emily add the covers to her ever-growing shrine.

(Now keep reading -- are you really surprised we'd both weigh in on this amazin', amazin', amazin' night?)

They advertise that you can't script October. But don't tell me we didn't submit this treatment.

Would you have it any other way? Could you ask for a better 300-minute span, one in which the team we hate — along with its final abhorrent remnant of overblown aura and phony mystique — is destroyed and the team we love advances? But never mind Them from here on out. Now it is only about Us, baby.

Just Us and October.

I come to you from under the adjustable mesh cap the Mets promised those of us who forgave them and their union brethren for striking out most of the summer of 1981. It was Re-Opening Night, August 14. So many of the regruntled walked up to watch the Mets and Phillies that the Mets ran out of caps. So they gave us rainchecks. In a couple of weeks I'd be heading to Florida to start college and wouldn't be able to lay my hands on what was coming to me. Fortunately, my sister's fiancé lived on Melbourne Avenue in Flushing, so she agreed to swing by Shea's advance ticket window when she was in the neighborhood and exchange my slip for my cap. She did it, but said she found it a depressing chore.

Her effort wasn't for naught. She sent the cap to me in Tampa and I wore it for years. Even though I thought the NY was a bit too big, I wore it. I wore it as the Mets sucked and I wore it as the Mets improved. I wore it in my Corolla driving home from school in the summer of '84. I made a point of putting it on when I got out to get gas in Delaware. This, as the Eastern Division had been, was Phillies country. My cap sent a message: the Mets were taking over.

This is the cap I wore as 1984 came close and 1985 came closer and 1986 exploded. This is the cap I wore the last time I watched the Mets win a postseason series on television, the night the Mets beat the Red Sox. (It was my great good fortune to be at Shea for their three subsequent clinches: two NLDS, one NLCS.) By the early '90s, I had moved on to other caps. When we moved into a new place in 1992, I found a hook on the living room ceiling, the kind people use to hang plants. I used it to hang my hat. Somewhere along the way, the sun bleached the mesh to purple. Except for rare cameos, the Cap Night cap has been retired.

Saturday evening, after the Tigers won their first round, I fished around my box of caps to find the appropriate headgear for a potential clinching. Particularly after what happened in Detroit, I decided it was important to be true to my Met self. Nothing symbolic, nothing subtle, nothing strategic...just the blue cap with the oversized orange NY that I rode from obscurity in 1981 to euphoria in 1986 and, I suppose, back to obscurity by the beginning of the next decade. It's the cap I wore when the Mets were the only New York team that got to play into the heart of October.

After wearing it tonight, it still is. And the Mets still are.

I wore it while I watched the bottom of the ninth inning and I thought back to that aforementioned clinching night 20 years ago, the last time I hoped I'd see something that great on TV and actually did. I thought about how I had the sound turned down then so I could hear Bob Murphy, not some stranger, give me the best news possible. I thought about how when Marty Barrett swung and missed, I celebrated with my mother, no longer with us, and my father, no longer interested.

But I also thought about where I am now. All week, I've found great warmth in knowing that everything about my life is being Met-baptized anew. This was the first playoff game I watched on television with Stephanie in our current home. May sound like I'm creating a an overly discrete subset, but I don't think so. As Billy Wagner and the final Dodger batters made the wait for the third out interminable, I paced anxiously behind our couch. Whenever I do that during a game, it brings me back to the night Cliff Floyd launched that Monsta bomb against the Angels last year. From here on out, pending whatever comes next, it's where I stood waiting for the first postseason series win since 2000, something I got to see a couple of pitches later.

This place has now been truly Met-consecrated, with the blessings of a blue and orange October.

The living room is where I was when Billy Wagner induced a fly ball from Ramon Martinez to Shawn Green.

The stereo speakers in the corner are where I heard Howie Rose, Murph's successor, put it in the books.

That spot over there by the recliner is where Stephanie and I hugged long and hard.

To the left of the television is where I picked up Avery and danced with him as long as he'd let me while I belted out a verse or two of Takin' Care of Business, a tune I've grown mighty fond of lately. Just after we moved in here in the summer of 2004, I lured Bernie into my arms for an impromptu tango when Shane Spencer dribbled home Kaz Matsui for a Subway Series win. Back then the team song was The Way You Move. Back then the Yankees were involved. Back then beating them was the most we could hope for out of life.

Me, my cats and our Mets have come a long way in two years.

The kitchen, incidentally, is where our atomic clock that keeps precise time via some satellite technology I don't understand mysteriously reset itself to Pacific Daylight Saturday morning. It's been running on what amounts to Mets time ever since. Not unlike New York going forward.

I don't know what's up with the clock, but it's good to know my 25-year-old cap still works perfectly.