One of the things I write for the Online Journal is a daily roundup of the Web's best sportswriting called the Daily Fix. (It's co-written by Carl Bialik, a great writer, Mets fan and my neighbor in Brooklyn.) This week is the Fix's fifth anniversary, and over at wsj.com Carl and I will be marking the occasion with some retrospective pieces that we hope are only mildly self-indulgent.

The first of them looks back at the biggest sports stories of the Fix's first five years. Nary a Met to be seen, alas, but there are two links within it that I thought might be of interest. The first is my farewell to Ted Williams, one of my favorite pieces for the Online Journal. The second is a farewell to Tug McGraw I got some guy to write. Prince of a fellow, you might say.

Sunday Night Baseball is a contrivance. It was created for ESPN in 1990 and smacks of football, something we'd all keep out of our beloved pastoral pastime if given the choice...which we as fans rarely are. If we are one of its participants, it screws up our weekend rhythms completely. Wake to a gorgeous Sunday morning, count the hours to 1:10 PM — or, perhaps, wake to a gorgeous Sunday afternoon and click on the bedside radio, first or second inning already in progress — that's what summer is all about. Instead, thanks to MLB's deals with devils, it's not there. Your Sunday afternoon is a void. You're left loitering for seven hours, all the way to Sunday night when your rhythms tell you you have other things to do, whether it's dreading Monday or savoring HBO. To top it off, sometimes there's little warning. It's one thing when they saddle you with 8:05 in the pocket schedule; you can plan. But when they pull the plug on 1:10 because some network, which you know would rather be fawning on the Red Sox (or Steelers) 24/7, needs some between-X-Games filler? It's ghastly, I tell you. Ghastly.

I believe everything I've just said. Yet none of it meant a damn thing last night. I fucking love these Sunday night games. They're practically the only ones I go to that the Mets win.

Thanks to my friend Dan, whom Omar didn't mind selling a prorated Sunday plan, I was tucked into a happy corner of the loge for something I'd been missing all season. I finally got to see the Mets have one of those explosive innings that I'd only witnessed on TV, the kind they apparently meet and decide in advance not to have if they know I'm not going to be there.

The Mets' overall record's the thing, and taking the last two has suddenly dwindled our magic number to Casey Kasem proportions: 40. But this habit I'd had thrust upon me of trudging home in 2006 on the wrong end of one 9-3 score after another had made me cranky: Hot dogs, green grass all out at Shea, everybody but me (4-8) guaranteed to have a heckuva day.

Hence, they should play every home game on Sunday night; I'm 2-0, for crissake. And to think when Dan invited me for what was originally listed as an afternoon affair and we found out it had been switched, there was discontent in the air. Silly fans, day games are for kids.

You gotta understand that Dan and I have been jinxing each other for the past five seasons. We meet up inside and B.J. Surhoff in right throws out Jeff D'Amico at first. We wander in together and our September swoon receives a lethal injection. If we even know we're in the park at the same time, Bronson Arroyo shuts us down. The only times the Mets seemed to win games Dan and I attended was when we weren't aware of each other's presence. Oh, you were at that scintillating Seo-Maddux duel, too? I didn't know that! No wonder we won.

Neither of us lacks for logic, but we were convinced we were a whammy, Mets fans who couldn't go to Mets games in tandem, buddies forever cursed to end these affairs with "well, it was fun except for the result." I hate that. So does Dan.

But Sunday Night Baseball changed all that. On Sunday night, we watched a rookie pitcher (ours, not theirs) squirm out of one unpleasant situation early and then cruise like Smokey Robinson the rest of his way. On Sunday night, we watched another rookie pitcher (theirs, not ours) show he had been studying fielding at the feet of Jon Lieber. On Sunday night, the Mets of John Valentin were finally buried deep in our past while the Mets of Jose Valentin delivered a joyful present right before our very eyes.

Most of all, Sunday night was the night we got to see what the future could and should look like at the Shea to be Named Later. David Wright, who can buy us all copious amounts peanuts and Cracker Jack and not care if he gets change back, lashed that huge double down the left field line. Lastings Milledge, looking like the guy none of us wanted to let go for just any pitcher, scorched one up the middle. And Professor Reyes earned his doctorate in bases-loaded home run hitting. The three of them, combined age barely enough to be Julio Franco's big brother, were primarily responsible (well, them and Mathieson's E-1) for the seven-run fourth. They'll be back for more.

After they did their young and frisky thing, Dan and I could no longer deny that maybe, just maybe, we weren't a mutual jinx, that the obstructed loge right field view is just about perfect, that Sunday night at 8:05 is not only convenient but appropriate, that ESPN can tell us to start whenever it wants from now on.

With nearly 40,000 compatriots a-hootin' and a-hollerin' and making Philadelphia feel like Punxsutawney (tiny and wondering where the hell its shadow went), you don't have to delineate between Sheas and anti-Sheas for me. In the context of my recent travels, Shea is the anti-Busch. It's not nice. It's not polite. It's not monochromatic. It is, however, on Sunday nights like these, pretty freaking awesome.

It's no secret that Shea can be a boorish place, full of drunks who've advanced directly to Seriously Antisocial without ever having landed on Amiable or Funny, dimwits who can't find their seats and aren't interested to hear they're in yours, asleep/feckless ushers, catatonic cashiers and people who apparently forked over $18 to $25 to yap on their cellphones about how bored they are. There's no such thing as a visit to the big blue rattletrap without at least one of the above; on a bad night you'll find yourself beset by all of them and wondering why you didn't just watch it on TV.

But then every once in a while you get the opposite: convivial seatmates, a cheerful, interested crowd, and an all-around fine time -- one that can make the occasional stopped escalator, geysering toilet or unplugged Carvel kiosk just something to shrug aside as colorful scenery.

Happily, this was one of those nights I got the Anti-Shea.

It started on the subway: My car was taken over, in a good way, by a six-foot-plus Montana cowboy, complete with a deep tan, the kind of moustache Sam Elliott sports in "The Big Lebowski," 10-gallon hat, giant belt buckle and gorgeous ostrich boots. Anyone who got within five feet of him got cheerfully greeted and interrogated; to him, New York City was a rollicking good adventure, from the subway he was on to the folks on their way home to Flushing and the subway musicians who came by to entertain us and the view out the window and the prospect of the ballgame he was headed to. It was tempting to follow him and watch how many people he could befriend on the ticket line, but I had a friend of my own to meet, so I let him go his way, silently thanking him for putting me in such a fine mood. (And New York City is a rollicking good adventure, if you let it be.)

My pal Aileen had been kind enough to offer me a spare ticket; she and I made our way to the upper deck, ejected two puzzled but nice-enough interlopers from our seats and got down to the cheerful business of drinking beer, chatting about baseball and work and writing and childhood misadventures and enjoying a wonderfully cool summer evening with the playoff-bound Mets on the national stage. An efficient, pleasant vendor kept us supplied with Budweiser (and returned at the last minute with ice cream), didn't sweat a forgotten ID and offered an explanation of the vendor trade (vendors pick what they'll haul around in order of seniority, if you're curious), along with stray but welcome bits of existentialism. The guys behind us were loud and boisterous (after they left I noticed an impressive number of little airplane bottles of booze under their seats) but knew their stuff, down to Maine's newfound reliability and Wright's new contract and Utley's old hitting streak. The guys in front of us looked like "Dazed and Confused" extras, and were lackadaiscally babysitting a couple of junior metalheads, which meant protesting if their charges didn't check in every two innings or so and good-naturedly giving them crap about constantly needing more money. But all involved were just fine, and having a good time.

The nearest thing to a badly behaved fan? It was me, at least for the moment I noticed the Mets were fawning on Joe Morgan and had to scream "MORGAN! YOU SUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKK!!!!!" at the fullest volume I could muster.

One of the vaguely babysat metalheads could have passed for me circa 1981, in fact: He had long blond hair, was decked out in Iron Maiden garb and around the eighth inning was frantic to spend his last $20 or so of ballpark money on some souvenir -- any souvenir. The kid returned with a fascimile autograph ball bescribbled in machine black, and it was all I could do to laugh out loud. On the few occasions I got to Shea as a kid, inevitably in the back of somebody's mother's station wagon, I'd spend the first four or five innings obsessing about what to get with whatever ballgame money my mom had given me, then spend two innings dithering or inhaling soft ice cream, and then realize the game was almost over and wind up racing frantically around the stadium (having been threatened with eternal grounding if I wasn't back before the ninth), only to find all the shutters had come down on all the forerunners of the clubhouse shops. I'd return at the last possible moment with a Toronto Blue Jays pennant or something equally stupid, which I'd lose within a week or two. Mrs. Heingartner kept a better eye on us and certainly didn't preface every other word with fuckin', but the overall effect wasn't dissimilar. Nice to see some things don't change.

Anyway, all good, helped by the fact that down on the field John Maine was flinging Phillies aside like bowling pins and Jose Reyes was celebrating his contract in grand style and all was right with the baseball world. Nice place, this Anti-Shea. It could grow on a fella.