The world's our Rocky Mountain oyster.

Hits don't lie. Neither does endlessly errorless fielding.

I particularly liked Valentin's second homer. It smacked square off the CR on the Rockies cap billboard above the right field fence. That's a message hit.

In handicapping the Wild Card race, don't put your money on the Astros, the Braves, the Dodgers or the Marlins. Why not? They all still have to play us.

With our 82nd win, we secured a winning record for the second straight year, about as suspense-free a milestone as we'll ever achieve. With nine more carefully chosen wins (one over Houston, one over Atlanta, two over Los Angeles, three over Florida, two over Washington), we'll have managed to have won or split every season series with all our National League opponents.

Gotta stay motivated. Then again, I ain't 'fraida no coast. But if the Mets don't do something well, it's coast.

Phillies won, so we move magically by but one.

16.01: Present at the Creation. Faith and Fear in Flushing was founded on February 16, 2005. The very first words I wrote: When is Omar going to get off the stick and sign Jose Valentin, Endy Chavez, Darren Oliver, Guillermo Mota and Dave Williams? We're never going to win until we have guys like those!

16.02: Doc. On July 30, 1985, Dwight Gooden, No. 16 in your programs and No. 1 in your hearts, raised his record to 16-3, shutting out the Expos, striking out 10. Joel and I heard the score on WINS driving back from Boston having watched Tom Seaver raise his lifetime win total to 299.

16.03: No Scrubs. Unlike the neglect he has piled on the Hernandez legacy, Charlie Samuels has protected Doc's. Since Gooden left in '94, 16 has been issued only to experienced players with a legit claim to it: Hideo Nomo, Derek Bell (Doc tribute), David Cone (Doc tribute), Doug Mientkiewicz, Paul Lo Duca. I'd like to think Charlie made up an '86 model for its proper bearer a couple of weeks ago just in case.

16.04: Another Fallen Idol. For my high school graduation, I was given a baseball shirt with a Mets 16 insignia on the left breast. It was to honor the Mets' only marketable player, Lee Mazzilli. I wore it in 1981 for Mazz. I wore it in 1982 and 1983 for nobody. In 1984 it became my Doc shirt.

16.05: It Still Adds Up, But Not For Us. Kaz Matsui wore 25 as a Met because 7 was taken and 2 plus 5 equals 7 in any language. As a Rockie, he's No. 16. And we're still better off without him.

16.06: Turn Around Now...Switch! Felix Millan wore 16 in 1973. Then he grabbed 17 from Teddy Martinez and Martinez took 23 in 1974, which Dave Schneck wore in '73 before going with 16 in '74. In 1976, John Stearns wore 16 and Lee Mazzilli wore 12. In 1977, John Stearns wore 12 and Lee Mazzilli wore 16. Names were added to the backs of Met uniforms in 1979 when everybody in one would have preferred anonymity.

16.07: Chuck Berry. Sweet Little 16. She's just got to have. About half a million. Framed autographs. How much of her allowance did she spend on framing anyway?

16.08: Dream Date. I've never picked up an issue of 16 magazine, but 35 years ago in late August I will cop to a copy of Tiger Beat because David Cassidy was on the cover and the Partridge Family, briefly my favorite show, was inside. These days, I'm swooning over David Williams, who must think he won a contest. In 200 words or less, tell us why YOU deserve a promotion to the best team in baseball! If you win, you'll get to pitch with AWESOME defense behind you and GROOVY offense supporting you! You even get to RUN THE BASES! The contest has expired, as Williams has been sent down, but he'll be back next week. And speaking of Tiger Beat, isn't that Craig Monroe dreamy?

16.09: Lucky Cat, Lucky Us. On September 16, 2005, we adopted a kitten and named him Avery. Before he showed up, the Mets had been dragging through their traditional August-September slide, 3-16 at that point. On the first night of Avery, Pedro beat the Braves, sparking a 12-4 finishing kick that clinched a winning season and augured better things for 2006. Since Avery made his debut, the Mets are 94-53. He hasn't slowed down either.

16.10: Quickly Consistent. The first 32 victories of Tom Seaver's career came in two sets of 16 — 16-13 in '67, 16-12 in '68. More than 10% of his lifetime victories (311) were earned on teams that finished a cumulative 56 games under .500.

16.11: Up The Dial. On Friday, Air America Radio moves to 1600 AM, WWRL. WWRL was my favorite station between 1997 and 2000 when it played soul classics. Then: Al Green. Now: Al Franken. Elusive: Al Schmelz.

16.12: Dr. Hook. She was only 16, only 16, but I loved that girl so. We were too young to fall in love and I was too young to know.

16.13: Where Was Jay Hook? When I was only 16, only 16, the Mets won only 63, only 63. The Mets' deadline deals were for Dock Ellis and Andy Hassler, both more comfortable over the hill than on it. I ran into a Mets fan that hideous summer who told me he loved those trades and that in five years we were gonna be real good. It was 1979; he was half-right.

16.14: Where Was The Humidor When We Needed It? That infamous 26-7 rout at the Vet makes our nightly blowouts in Denver look like we're in the Year of the Pitcher. On June 11, 1985, the Phillies ran up a 16-0 lead after two innings. I think I'm gonna call the FAN right now and fret that we haven't done that yet.

16.15: Prove It All Night. Everybody remembers that on July 4 and 5, 1985, the Mets and Braves played 19 innings and until 3:55 AM in Atlanta. Does anybody recollect the final score? We won 16-13. The Braves were so embarrassed, they vowed to eventually build a new stadium and beat the Mets senseless for nearly a decade.

16.16: Ringo Starr. You walked out of a dream, peaches and cream, lips like strawberry wine. The Mets are 16 from clinching, they're beautiful and they're mine. And yours.

I got an email today from an old pal and fellow dedicated Met fan in New Orleans, where I was once nearly assaulted for watching the Mets instead of porn. My old pal's question: "Has this whole season been one of the best goddamn things to happen to you in years or what?"

Better believe it. But it got me thinking. The closest thing to the dizzying 2006 season so far is 1986 -- no pennant race to speak of after June, a suspense-free summer of jaw-dropping domination. But for me as a Met fan, this year really has no parallel. I'm old enough to remember 1986 -- I was 17. But for me, 1986 didn't unfold on TV or the radio. I was away at school, and had to content myself most days with a paragraph and a box score in the newspaper, assuming the Mets weren't on the West Coast. Sure, I saw the team on WOR when I was home in Florida, caught whatever Games of the Week I could, and soaked up as much of the mythology of that swaggering band as I could hold. But that's not the same as seeing the team day-in and day-out. Until the postseason, I couldn't do that. By necessity, my fandom was secondhand.

As bloggers go, Greg and I are old men -- as far as I can tell, most of our bloggy peers are in their early to mid-20s. Which means they didn't see 1986 either -- they've absorbed it via books and rain-delay programming and videos. We've had other great seasons, but there wasn't a cakewalk in the bunch -- 1969 required a lengthy, from-outta-nowhere chase of the Cubs, 1973 was stranger than fiction, 1988 wasn't a runaway until late (and even then the team felt vulnerable), 1999 demanded a 163rd game, 2000 was a wild-card berth. If you're a twentysomething blogger, or a 37-year-old who couldn't see most of the regular season, this is uncharted territory.

Uncharted territory filled with wonders. These days it feels like we play two kinds of games -- ones in which we dominate from the starting gun, and ones in which we wait patiently for late-inning magic. (And every so often we somehow lose one.) Suffocating defense. An offense whose power, speed and patience makes it trebly deadly. Starting pitching that's serviceable to good, relief pitching that's lights-out. Limitless confidence. These days even our missteps are entertaining -- if starting pitchers keep getting on base, I suppose it's logical that they'll eventually step over one. Games like tonight, in other words. We're fans of the best team in baseball, baby. You could look it up.

I can only imagine this is what 1986 felt like, as we pulled away like Secretariat at the Belmont. But the parallels with 1986 shouldn't just be the stuff of celebration. There's a warning in there, too.

A summer like this, whether or not it comes with a magical October, is a once-a-generation thing. Injuries wrecked the 1987 Mets, bad defense and bad luck and ghostwritten columns flushed 1988 down the toilet, and after that the team became more and more poorly constructed until finally imploding in the summer of 1991. The Mets didn't win anything in 1987 -- or in 1970 or 1974 or 1989 or 2001. A young talented core is a marvelous thing to have, but it guarantees nothing. Hell, a regular season like this one guarantees nothing -- the '86 Mets needed some hairsbreadth escapes to avoid being a historical footnote.

Don't get bored, complacent or jaded. Don't mutter about how long it's taking for October to arrive. Yeah, we've all thought it, and it's just human nature to want to get to the main event, to see how it all turns out. But fight it. Soak these days in. Carpe Met'm, boys and girls. Write down the details and promise to do your best to remember. You owe it to yourself. Because we'll forget. Because before you know it we'll be watching some Met hit into a double play during a meaningless late-season game. Because it might be 2026 before a summer like this comes along again.