When the Marlins finally decamp for San Antonio or Las Vegas or Portland or Oz or whereever it is that they're going, I want a guarantee: No one will ever again play, practice, discuss, reference, allude to or think about baseball at Soilmaster Stadium ever again.

I could go over to Retrosheet and crunch some numbers, but it would be a futile and useless gesture, because those numbers lie. They're false memories and out-and-out fabrications, about as reliable as the moon landing, and I don't want to hear about them. In reality we're 0-97 here, or something similarly terrible, with every game reminding me of why I loathe this place more than any baseball stadium not infested with Yankees. Green cathedrals? Bah. Leave bread in some forgotten nook of the pantry too long in the summer and it'll turn green, but I'm not genuflecting.

This fricking place. The light's wrong. The dimensions are strange, not strange as in quirky but strange as in what moron thought this up. And terrible thing after terrible thing happens to us here. Aces get left on the table for the crime of giving up two lousy runs in seven innings. Reliable, begoggled relievers are left agog by line drives to the left and the right and line drives to the in between. Those line drives to the in between strike bases imitating pinball bumpers. Ironman third basemen get back spasms. Anonymous 15-year-old Marlins run through coaches' stop signs and incur no penalty. Lineups go cold. And you wonder how a team that a moment ago seemed primed for October suddenly looks like it was awoken in January and asked to take some swings.

I like the idea of the San Antonio Marlins, who'd quickly become the Missions or the Riverwalkers or the Surrounded or some such. We could swap them to the NL Central for the Pirates, who are like half-remembered strangers these days. The Spurned could maybe get a little rivalry going with the Astros or the Diamondbacks. Or maybe they couldn't; I've been to all 50 states but I must confess age is leaving my sense of geography a little frayed at the edges -- these days I can tell you with great certainty that San Antonio, Houston, Phoenix and Manhattan are all west of Brooklyn, but ask me to get more specific and I'll distract you and run for the exit.

Which is what I wish we could do every time I see we're playing the Marlins and we're the visitors. If these particular young men went west, I could relax into the warm embrace of knowing I'd never, ever have to watch our team stumble through a listless Soilmaster evening again.

Welcome to Flashback Friday, a weekly feature devoted to the 20th anniversary of the 1986 World Champion New York Mets.

Twenty years, 43 Fridays. This is one of them.

I haven't checked with anybody who emerged from the womb in the thirty seconds on either side of me, so I can't confirm if I was the sucker born every minute the minute I was born. But after reading this, I think we'll agree that I was a prime candidate.

To evaluate my suckerish tendencies, we're going to have get to 1986 by way of 1988, for that's when the suckering was attempted. 1988 is probably the least well thought of relatively great year in Mets history and, hands down, the least favorite year of my life. It was the year my mother was diagnosed with cancer. It was the year I lost just about all of my freelance livelihood. And it was the year somebody attempted to mess with the moment I cherished above all others.

Somebody tried to sell me the Bill Buckner ball. Or Mookie Wilson ball. Take your pick. He had it, showed it to me and named a price.

In the ensuing years, I'd hear the story of how an umpire, Ed Montague, picked up the ball and tossed it to longtime front office fixer Arthur Richman and that Arthur gave it to Mookie but Mookie urged Arthur to keep it and that in 1992, at his cousin's urging, Arthur auctioned it off and it was bought by Charlie Sheen for $93,500. Sheen got bored with the ball or perhaps needed spare change to pay his prostitutes and it was sold again in 2000, this time for $63,944 (a lot less, but still plenty when converted to hookers) to Seth Swirsky a writer made good — very good, apparently.

That's not how I understood the path of the ball, though. I got a much different story. My source wasn't Mookie or Richman or any of the mainstream media that followed the bouncing ball from between Buckner's legs into auctions and collections, never mind history.

My source was this guy. Yes, we'll call him This Guy, short for This Guy who ran a baseball card store in the fall of 1988. TG will do.

TG's shop wasn't just any baseball card store. It was a counter in the back of a tobacco shop. As I don't smoke, I don't generally frequent those establishments, but there was one in Oceanside I'd wander into occasionally to buy the papers — newspapers, not tobacco papers. News to me was that this little baseball kiosk existed in the store; I had never seen it there before. What drew me in was a blue poster on which there were orange letters that expressed the most noble sentiments known to man:

LET'S GO METS!

It was a giveaway from the Daily News, handed out at Shea on Opening Day 1987. The poster was accented by a snipe confirming that the Mets were 1986 World Champions. It also had a drawing of Basement Bertha (before she and Bill Gallo lost their respective minds altogether) jumping up and down with a Mets pennant. I had to have it.

So I went inside and asked the man in the back how much for the poster. He seemed surprised somebody wanted it. Uh, five bucks he said like he was doing me a favor. Though I gathered it was perhaps 15 cents worth of cardboard, I ponied up. Five bucks was a lot of money to me at the time, but the Mets were everything.

Since he didn't have any customers and I had nowhere in particular to be this Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I hung around after we exchanged paper to glance at his other inventory and chat baseball memorabilia. I noticed he was asking way more for a Gregg Jefferies baseball card than he was for Basement Bertha or almost anything else. I knew Jefferies was hot and that rookie cards were a big deal, but I asked that if on the off chance Jefferies didn't make the Hall of Fame, wouldn't it not be a great investment?

Nah, said TG. Even if Gregg Jefferies doesn't have the kind of career we all know he'll have, the hype surrounding him will forever be such a part of us that of course his rookie card will endure into eternity as one of the icons of the age. According to Beckett right now, I should be able to nab a Gregg Jefferies rookie card for about 50 cents, or far less than TG said it would be worth. And according to the Baseball Hall of Fame, there's no Gregg Jefferies plaque on order.

I wasn't interested in buying a baseball card. I only wanted that cardboard with the LET'S GO METS! and I got that. It cheered me up. What a rotten year had it been. My mother sick. My career in tatters. The Mets had gotten nipped by the Dodgers. The Hurricanes had gotten screwed by the refs and Notre Dame (I actually cared about college football then). Dukakis had rolled over and played dead for Bush. Nothing was going my way in the fall of 1988. A little positive Mets reinforcement was just the ticket for momentary happiness. I was vulnerable.

"Hey, what's that?"

That was me thinking, not talking. I don't like dealing with salesmen, not those whose job it is to sell things when I'm in their line of sight. When I bought the only new car I've ever bought, I practically needed a month in a sanitarium afterwards. Given my trusting instincts, I find the best weapon I have in negotiating sales pitches is ability to recoil, run and hide. So I pretended, amid our Gregg Jefferies chat, not to notice the hand-printed sign whose hand-printed arrows pointed to a plastic case on a shelf behind the counter:

The Ball That Went Through Buckner's Legs

Oh, is that all that is? Just the near-biblical artifact that two years after it became what it became, I regularly went to bed trying to figure out ways to dream about. That boll rolling where it did and changing the course of history for the better as it did was still the best reality I knew. 1988 wasn't going to stop sucking for me, but even 1988 couldn't obliterate 1986. And 1986 would remain 1986 well into the 21st century because of that little item.

Asking price: $175.

I seem to recall TG bringing it up first. He was a low-rent Ricky Roma, the Al Pacino character from Glengarry Glen Ross. Ricky didn't hard-sell his marks. He talked philosophically with them, about what was good about life, about what wasn't important and what was. Y'know what's good, what really lasts?

I want to show you something. It might mean nothing to you...and it might not. I don't know. I don't know anymore…but look here: what is this? This is a piece of land. Listen to what I'm going to tell you now...

TG was going on a bit about the hardships of running a baseball card business, about the perceived inauthenticity of his stock and the rampant mistrust he met trying to make an honest buck when he pointed to the shelf behind him, the plastic case on it and the sign with the arrows.

"I don't know why people don't believe me about the Buckner ball."

"Oh yeah," I confessed. "I was kind of wondering about that."

Good thinking. Tell the salesman that you are intrigued with his shiniest bauble. I'll just leave my wallet here and you take what you need.

This was long before the day of Doug Mientkiewicz. Not that trinkets and trash hadn't already acquired a substantial tag by the late 1980s, but not every baseball connected to every event was automatically assumed to be Tiffany's material (Tiffany's the jeweler, not Tiffany the singer; this was 1988). Still, I actually had wondered what happened to the ball Mookie Wilson hit up the line in the earliest hour of Sunday, October 26, 1986. Last pitches usually find logical destinations. Catchers cradle strikeouts. Fielders put away putouts. Walkoff homers are followed over the fence to whomever picks them up from there. But I had never seen where the ball Mookie nubbed landed. The last I saw of it was the right field grass. Buckner didn't run after it and Dwight Evans didn't come charging in on it.

TG was happy to fill in my blanks. His uncle, you see, was Uncle Sal, a Shea cop. A "special" — one of those semi-official officers who hops over the stands when the game ends to keep the likes of you and me from rushing the field. Uncle Sal was working the box seats in right. When Mookie's ball evaded Buckner's grasp and Ray Knight scored from second, the game ended. Never mind that in a blink it became the single most extraordinary game in Mets history, perhaps baseball history. It was the end of a game. Uncle Sal and the specials had to hit the grass like always.

Ed Montague was the right field umpire in Game Six. He picked up the ball. We all agree on that. But he didn't seek out Arthur Richman, according to TG. He handed it to his buddy Uncle Sal. Everybody knew Uncle Sal. There were pictures on the back wall of the tobacco shop of Uncle Sal with baseball celebrities like Tommy Lasorda. Managers liked Uncle Sal. Umpires loved him. Not just Montague. All six who worked the 1986 World Series autographed the Mookie ball for him. Could it be any more authentic?

Now Uncle Sal passed the ball along to his nephew TG who was selling it for $175 in the back of a tobacco shop in Oceanside. Four thoughts raced through my mind...

1) That's a lot of money for me right now.
2) That's not a lot of money for the greatest baseball in the history of the world.
3) There's no way THAT'S the greatest baseball in the history of the world.
4) Yeah, but what if that's really THE BALL?

Listen, I was 25 years old. In Stengelese, I wuzn't no Ned in the third reader, but I was a little more callow than I'd have cared to let on. I couldn't let go of the possibility, however remote, that Uncle Sal really was the repository of treasure and that TG's allegedly airtight story and $175 were all that stood between me and owning the object that had given me the best moment I was sure I'd ever have as a Mets fan and as a human being.

I'll turn the rest of the story over to my journal entry of November 24, 1988:

There was no legal certification saying, yes, this was The Ball. The guy seemed genuine. But who knows? Still, when he brought it down, took it out of its case and left it out on the counter for me to inspect, it was overwhelming. I could only allow myself to touch it quickly. My eyes were seconds away from watering. Was this really The Ball? The ball that carried me to a height of euphoria I'll probably never match for intensity and frenzy and suddenness? The Ball that went through Buckner's legs? The most famous baseball in New York Mets history?

I'd very much like to believe it was. Of course if I were interested in purchasing it, the guy might ask it I'd like to see something in George Washington's skate key. Who knows how many baseball card store owners in the metropolitan area have Uncle Sals who are friendly with Ed Montague?

What gets me is why this man would sell this one. OK, he's in business and it is an attractive item. But geez, he's a Mets fan. If you're not going to keep it, how could you stick it on a shelf next to a ball signed by Mario Soto (or whoever)? Shouldn't it be in Cooperstown or at least the Diamond Club? Shouldn't you present it to Mookie? Even auction it for charity?

Usually, as in the case of the Let's Go Mets sign, if I see something that sticks in my subconscious and it becomes available at a reasonable price, I snatch it up. Luckily we're talking about things like soda cans that cost 70 or 80 cents. (I'd rather have [a particular can that I still regretted not buying in North Carolina in 1983] than a Rolex.) If I had $175 to casually lay down on expensive trinkets, I'd buy The Ball if, IF, IF I was sure it was The Ball.

It would be terrible to have it around if it were discovered to be a fraud. Not just because of the obvious. The Ball is the most powerful talisman, the holiest grail I personally could imagine. I could not worship a false idol.

And even if I knew I had the real thing and it came to me any other way than directly, I'd feel funny about it. First off, I'd spend all day staring at it. Second, it would be incomplete unless I could get Number Six's bow legs to place over it. Finally, I couldn't deprive the rest of Metsdom from this "national" treasure. I'd have to take it on tour.

Maybe I'll just go back to the store and take a picture of it. I just want it to wind up in a good, loving home.

I didn't buy the ball. I didn't take a picture. I never went back to TG's concession which was eventually removed from the back of the tobacco shop which may or may not still be there. I've never heard anybody cry serious foul over the Montague-to-Mookie-to-Richman-to-Sheen-to Swirsky connection. Buckner once raised a ruckus that Sheen bought a phony but then recanted (troubled man, our Bill). Nobody's ever come forward on a public stage to claim, WAIT! I have an uncle who worked at Shea and...nothing like it.

Nevertheless, I touched a ball that somebody said was The Ball. Like a second-inning inside-the-park homer erased in a fourth-inning downpour, I suppose it doesn't count. But I did touch it. And though I knew better, it touched me.

Got a great e-mail last night from a woman who took her kids to the game yesterday, presumably on the sly. Said it was a great day to play hooky from work.

Meanwhile, I had to work, yet felt I was playing hooky from baseball.

The last Mets game I missed in its entirety was Victor Zambrano's very first start, in Milwaukee, on August 5, 2004 (Mets 11 Brewers 6; I'll bet you assumed we lost). The next 262 games were cake. By luck or design, my schedule and the Mets' schedule meshed so that business never dragged me too far afield from the field, the television or the radio.

Thursday, a client needed my presence in its — not my — office. They needed me only until early afternoon, they said. I knew they were unintentionally making a funny, that this was going to be one of those situations that would last at least double the time they said it would, maybe longer. That's fine, as far as that goes. That's business.

But there was the little matter of Game No. 263.

Would I be able to continue what I assume to be my longest-ever personal Mets streak? And was I actually worried about this? Missing Mets games didn't keep me from going away to college, for instance. But I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. Still, there's a fine line between being Cal Ripken and being just creepy. Was I mismanaging my obsession or was I just being a fan who couldn't stand the idea that a Mets game was in progress and I wouldn't know what was going on?

That happens to people every time there's an afternoon affair. Or had I forgotten?

Making the decision to go the self-employment route two years ago, believe it or not, had nothing to do with the Mets, let alone blogging. Midweek afternoon games were sort of an accidental bonus...a non-paying bonus, but a little extra in my mental envelope to break up the routine of working alone every afternoon, something more interesting than Air America to have on in the background and something to which, for an inning or two except under most severe deadline pressure, I knew I could casually devote my attention if I wanted. When you work for yourself, you make your own benefits package.

Thus, I almost forgot that Mets fans are routinely deprived of daytime baseball action, that following a game on the sly, in bits and pieces, becomes necessary. That's how I did it in my magazine days. Usually I sat near a window, so WFAN reception was OK and I could at least keep up. If there was a 1:10 or 1:40 start, I'd time my lunch "hour" for well after two, maybe closer to three, that way I could go somewhere with my Walkman and catch the meaty part of the game. I was known to extend those hours like a rubber band if it was a close one. Delayed at least one pointless "let's redesign the book" meeting while I sat in Washington Square Park and listened to Jay Payton bang a walkoff homer off of Juan Acevedo (and I was still pissed off I couldn't stick around, feed the pigeons and hear it again and again on the postgame).

My distractions were generally indulged by employers and associates. If you work productively in a generally creative environment (I did), and your services are reasonably valued (mine were), you can acquire a certain status as the office something-or-other. I was always the office Mets fan. It was cute, so nobody kicked. "Oh there's Greg listening to his baseball game again. Isn't that adorable?" When I'd disappear for several innings, it was just understood that that's what I'd do. I'd be back and I'd stay late and it was no problem.

But when you're a hired gun as I am now, nobody knows your quirks. It's your services, not you they're interested in. Again, fine. I love that somebody wants my services. But they don't know that the Mets are trying to sweep the Phillies and that I'm trying to punch a 263rd notch in a very hole-y belt. I can't rightly say, "listen, those are all good ideas, but it's getting to be a little after one, so I recommend we all take three hours to think about what we've discussed, maybe a couple more if it's anything like the other night when it went fourteen and reconvene in this windowless room when we know more."

Dratted windowless rooms. They are a scourge on the American workplace. There was one embarrassing period on one of my old magazines when I lost my window. Did I say embarrassing? I meant distressing. No FAN reception at all. That was the year I subscribed to the mlb.com service that broadcasts play-by-play on your newfangled computer machine. It was good as far as it went but when I realized the feed was a minute or two or more behind real life, it seemed a fraud. I once got a call from a friend who was telling me how annoying it was that all these Yankee fans were at Shea just to cheer that non-entity, Tino Martinez of the Cardinals, and I didn't know what she was talking about because Martinez hadn't yet come up to bat on my PC. That was when I knew I had to quit that place.

Yesterday's big meeting surged past 1:10. Limped past 2:00. Must've been 2:30 when we finally got a break. I don't work there, I'm wearing a visitor's badge, yet I know what I have to do: Scour the premises for an empty office with a view and float unnoticed toward that office widow and furtively plug my ears into my tinier-than-life radio — with all the gadgets going around, I'm sure it looked I was on a very important call from Hong Kong — and hope that the game isn't in commercial or out of reach.

In all my existence, I was never so glad to hear Chris Russo's voice. It was the epitome of better than nothing.

Yes, as direly predicted the other day, my lifeline to the 263rd consecutive Mets game I've managed to catch at least a little piece of was an ignorant, spittling, gurgling, speech-challenged San Francisco Giants fan. But he was all I had. Chris Russo took me through Brett Myers striking out Cliff Floyd and let on that it was 3-3 after five. It wasn't much and it wasn't good, but it was my window into the Mets game. I managed to grab two more smidgens before the meeting was over, the second of which was Eddie C. saying, "Chase it must feel good to get one" and I could figure out he didn't mean a seat on the we-just-got-swept express. If I had a larger window, I would have stuck around to confirm that, but I had to go on instinct and go back to my meeting.

My two snippets of game action plus the highlights I heard on my way home (very long meeting) revealed Russo and Francesa were having a good time even if few listeners were likely to be having the same. As much as I'd like to, I can't criticize too much, and not just because of my reluctant gratitude that Mad Dog at Shea served my purposes like Murrow on a London rooftop during the Blitz. I didn't hear more than a half-dozen pitches live. Barely good enough for the streak, but not nearly enough for a critique.

For an informed appraisal, I will turn this over to that thoughtful reader I mentioned at the top. I will not reveal her name because in her e-mail to us, she indicated that she might have, uh, cough, cough , come down with a little cold yesterday morning and, uh, you know cough, cough, she wouldn't want to infect the rest of the office and, uh, cough, cough, if she just gives it a day's rest, she should be fine to come in tomorrow because the Mets are in Florida by then.

Not that I would know how that goes.

I attended today's game with my kids and was surprised to see that some 50,000+ other people felt the same way I did. What a great day to play hooky from work and go see a game! Unfortunately for the Mets, they lost in kind of boring fashion to the Phils.

More unfortunately for those of you who had to listen at home, Mike Francesca and Chris Russo were at the mic. I pity you if you had to listen. I never thought I'd say this but I'd rather listen to Sterling. Yuck. I took my jogger AM/FM radio with me but as soon as I heard Chris' whine, I turned it off. You should know that when they announced that Mike and the Mad Dog were in the booth today at Shea, the fans BOOED!

I listened to Mets Extra in the car while stuck in traffic on the way home. Russo's home runs calls were cringe-inducing. "It's GAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" No "n" in "gone". Apparently the Mad Dog doesn't enunciate. Russo's voice is to the ears what Lindsey Nelson's jackets were to the eyes. But at least Nelson could call a game without making the fans reach for the barf bag. Ugh.

What on earth were the suits at the WFAN thinking? Poor Murph must be spinning in his grave.

I love reading your blog. It's a great escape from work!