The Alou family connection to the Mets has been revived. It goes back a long way.

First, there was the game of September 22, 1963 at Candlestick Park during which the Giants were drubbing the Mets so decisively (13-2 en route to 13-4) that manager Alvin Dark could afford to choreograph history. In the seventh inning, Dark removed Willie Mays from center and inserted Matty Alou in left, replacing Mays with Felipe Alou who had been in right and shifting Jesus Alou from left to right. Everywhere you looked in the Giants' outfield, there were Alous, the first time three brothers played alongside one another out there. After the season, Felipe was traded to the Braves, so it was the only time, too.

Three other notes of trivia from that day so trivial as to be infinitesimal: 1) It was the Mets' first series away from home after the final baseball game ever played at the Polo Grounds, so technically they no longer had a home; 2) It was the road debut of Cleon Jones; 3) It was the last time the famous Dodger Duke Snider would ever face his old nemeses the Giants; a year later, having worn out his welcome with the Mets, he would finish his career as a displaced San Franciscan.

The Alous were a staple of National League ball through the '60s and into the early '70s, but the next time one of them played in games of surpassing importance against the Mets, it would be as an American Leaguer. Jesus Alou was a part-time outfielder on the 1973 A's, thrown into a greater role in that World Series after the club lost centerfielder Bill North to injury late in the year. Alou started five of the seven games versus the Mets, his most notable performance coming in Game Two in Oakland with three hits and two RBI in six at-bats.

That game, won 10-7 in 12 innings by the Mets, is better remembered for three other events: 1) Mike Andrews' two errors, miscues that Charlie Finley tried to parlay into an in-Series roster switch that wouldn't fly with Bowie Kuhn; 2) The piss-poor out call on Bud Harrelson at home plate in the tenth which stood even as Willie Mays pleaded with Augie Donatelli to rule Buddy safe; 3) Willie, one bridge and ten years removed from coming out to allow the all-Alou outfield, perhaps realizing at last that it was time to come out of the Oakland sun once and for all.

In 1975, Jesus Alou would become the first Met World Series opponent to play for them, joining the Mets on April 16 in St. Louis and serving mostly as a righty pinch-hitter. Though he hit .350 in 40 such at-bats (complementing the .400 Ed Kranpeool put up as a lefty off the bench), he showed no power, driving in 11 runs and homering not at all. Alou would be released the following spring. With Matty and Felipe no longer active, 1976 was the first season with no Alous in the Majors since 1957. But Jesus persevered away from the bigs and would hook on with the Astros in '78 and '79 before retiring.

Felipe Alou, of course, became a fixture in the visitors' dugout at Shea from 1992 to 2004 as his Expos regularly tormented the Mets (or so it seemed). One of his key early weapons was reliever Mel Rojas, a nephew of all three Alou brothers. Montreal being Montreal, the team let him go when he got too expensive. He signed unhappily with the Cubs in December 1996 and was traded to the Mets in August 1997. He pitched for his Uncle Jesus' old club most of the 1998 season. The Met uncle-nephew combination that was always a rumored trade away was Doc Gooden and Gary Sheffield. Instead, it turned out to be Jesus Alou and Mel Rojas, albeit 22 years removed from each other.

The less said about Mel Rojas' Met tenure, the better. I think we were all calling out some variation of "UNCLE JESUS!" when he'd trot in from the bullpen, though we may have been pronouncing it differently than Mel did.

And now Moises Alou, son of Felipe, becomes a Met, presumably unseating his and Cousin Mel's onetime Expo teammate Cliff Floyd...whose 2007 destination is not yet known, so let's pretend his departure is not yet official. Alou and Floyd went back-to-back in April, in a manner of speaking. On a Monday night in San Francisco, Willie Randolph ordered Tom Glavine (also still not altogether gone, sort of) to walk Barry Bonds so he could face Moises Alou. Alou made him pay, homering with two on, driving in five in all and leading the Giants to a frustrating — for us — 6-2 win. The next night, Floyd, slumping viciously, broke out for an evening, or at least a swing, taking Jamey Wright on a guided tour of McCovey Cove. The Mets won 4-1.

(The next day was the Brian Bannister/Barry Bonds affair, repeated so endlessly on Snigh that it's easy to forget the Mets and Giants played a three-game series.)

Used to be a 40-year-old outfielder implied a fellow who earned the right to hang around but was probably staying at the fair too long — someone like Willie Mays, who logged 98 games in center as a Met at ages 41 and 42, including that final glaring afternoon in Oakland. But players play longer and stay in better shape today. Moises Alou got into 98 games total in 2006, the year he turned 40, and that was considered not miraculous but a little disappointing. He hit 22 homers and drove in 74 runs. That should be considered encouraging.

If you need something else, there's the day he was born: Sunday, July 3, 1966. The Mets hosted Pittsburgh a twinbill, falling short in the opener 8-7 (after trailing 8-1), recovering in the nightcap 9-8 (after trailing 6-3). One of the Pirates on the field that day at Shea? Moises Alou's uncle Matty. He singled as a pinch-hitter in the first game and went 0-for-3 in the second.

In the twenty seasons they called it home, I never visited Shea Stadium to see the Jets play. It never came up as a possibility or as a desire. I wasn't a committed Jets fan (a redundancy) until I was 15 and the mechanics of seeing an NFL game in person, even though the Jets didn't necessarily sell out every week until late in their Queens tenure, struck me as too daunting to even consider. Baseball was something you wanted to go to. Football was something you watched on TV if it wasn't blacked out.

Watching the Jets from Shea on television was strange, especially once I started going to baseball games there enough to be familiar with its topography. Where did home plate go? What happened to the dugouts? Is that the 410 sign? If Lee Mazzilli can handle centerfield, why can't Pat Leahy?

Most stadiums used to have baseball teams and football teams. Even historic old ballparks had both. The Lions played in Tiger Stadium forever. The Bears used to kick up dust amid the brown Wrigley ivy. Lyric little bandbox Fenway hosted Patriot games. When Yankee Stadium was still Yankee Stadium, it was also the Giants' stadium. It wasn't unusual. The Mets and Jets as co-tenants, albeit with the Mets as seniors treating the Jets like perpetual freshmen, was the way business was taken care of until fairly recently.

Somewhere between the Jets threatening to move to the Meadowlands in the spring of 1977 and the fall of 1983 when they abandoned New York in search of spiffier restrooms, I decided that it was OK they were here...even if they were tearing up our grass. As one who didn't attend Jets games, there were no practical concerns for me, but New Jersey? For the Jets? That was Giants territory. It was Giants Stadium, for crissake. The Jets were headquartered at Hofstra. What were they going to do? Practice in Hempstead all week and then cross two rivers on a bus to play on Sunday?

Yeah, that's exactly what they did and still do and will do for at least a little longer before they relocate all operations to the Garden State and begin playing on a new piece of swampland in conjunction with their Big Blue cousins. The setting has never set right by me (the green drapes help only a little), but again, it's all a matter of television when I bother to be interested, and they do sell out every game over there, so what do I know?

With the floodgates wide open for Shea Met memories since last Monday, it occurred to me that we happen to be right upon the 25th anniversary of the greatest Jet game I ever watched from Flushing. That I saw it on a portable black & white set in Tampa doesn't diminish the joy I recall at its resolution.

In the first semester of my freshman year at USF I didn't really know anybody, so the first acquaintance I made was sports. Sports I knew. No baseball in Florida then, but there was football. The Bucs were in their sixth season in 1981, on the verge of an unlikely Central Division title in the NFC. I couldn't stand the Bucs, though. They were just too damn absurd to take seriously. Since they were all that Tampa Bay had to get excited about — besides the NASL Rowdies, that is — I took an abiding dislike to them the whole time I was in school. (If you heard "hey, hey, hey we're the Buccaneers!" a dozen times a day on Q-105, you would have, too.)

So I wouldn't have to follow the Bucs with any kind of commitment stronger than osmosis, I listened to Dolphins games. Miami was nowhere near Tampa, but they'd been the state's team before anybody knew what a Buccaneer was, hence their games aired in locally on WFLA. I had liked the Dolphins when I was 9 and they were finishing 14-0 while my family was spending Christmas in North Miami Beach (though if I knew they were going to be annually obnoxious about it, I wouldn't have). I hadn't given them any thought since they stopped appearing in Super Bowls except to hope the Jets beat them twice a year. One Sunday in mid-November, my first semester, I was listening to the Dolphins' postgame show after they lost to the Raiders (boy did I have no social life) when it was noted the Jets had won in Foxboro and had moved to within one game of Miami for the division lead. Next week, it would be the Dolphins (7-3-1) and the Jets (6-4-1 after an 0-3 start) in a battle for first. At Shea.

Having grown up in New York in the '70s loyal as a matter of principle to our home teams (how the bleep could you live here and root for the bleeping Cowboys?), I had had very few football games to which I could look forward, Jets or Giants. This one, on November 22, 1981, automatically became my biggest autumn Sunday to date. I anticipated it all week. I may have been something of a Johnny "Lam" Jones-come-lately to the Jets' cause, but a battle for first at Shea was a battle for first at Shea. I'd been waiting for one since 1973.

So it wasn't the Mets. You can't have everything.

One of my suitemates at my off-campus dorm (four guys, two rooms, connected by a bathroom) was from Fort Myers, about two hours down the coast. He was a Dolphins fan. Although the Mets were my calling card, I had made it clear that I liked the Jets. Well, he said, looks like we're going to have something to watch on Sunday. Lucky for me he had a TV and even luckier just about all Dolphins games were televised in Tampa.

Well, it was a great game. Richard Todd wasn't even supposed to play because of cracked ribs, but they outfitted him in a flak jacket. Generally not having Richard Todd wasn't that much of a hardship, but he was the starter and it was no time to leave our starters on the bench. Todd played magnificently. The Jet defense (in this, the year of the New York Sack Exchange) curbed Miami and gave Todd a chance to lead the Jets to victory. It would be tough. They were down 15-9 and on their own 23 with just over three minutes left.

But he did it. He hit six different receivers along the way. The last pass was to Jerome Barkum for a touchdown. It was 15-15. Then Leahy, never a sure thing kicking into Shea's Edmund Fitzgerald winds, nailed the extra point. Just like that the Jets were in first place.

The Jets were in first place!

My suitemate whose TV it was had left for work by the time his Dolphins lost. So it was just me and his non-fan roommate watching at the end. At the final gun, I did one of those leaps from a sitting position that one does without thinking. You're pretty excited there, the other suitemate said. You've got to understand, I told him. This is the first time I've seen the Jets in first place since 1969, a year I always liked to stick into sentences whenever I could.

He didn't care. But I did.

Shea Stadium was going wild, too. Sitting and leaping out there that late afternoon/early evening were 50,000-plus of the green and white who considered Shea home every bit as much then as I would for the next quarter-century. No doubt a lot of them were Mets fans as well as Jets fans. No doubt a lot of them were season-ticket holders who packed up with the Jets in 1984 and kept going to see them in the Meadowlands, fall after fall, decade after decade (bus after bus).

But the Jets have never looked right over there, even on TV, even when they were beating the Dolphins 51-45 in 1986, even considering they've now spent more years in Jersey than they did in Queens. They looked good at Shea a quarter-of-a-century ago tomorrow. They looked great. So did Shea.

Nothing strange about that.