So. Eighth inning. Two on. One out. Aaron Heilman on the hill. Here comes Mike Piazza, 800 feet of home runs hastily appended to his resume, only this time we're not talking about some cosmetic solo shot. He's the go-ahead run. Gary Cohen comments on the strange mix of wild cheers and sudden boos filling Shea, sagely noting something about the process by which a revered former player becomes the enemy.

No, not really. I wasn't in the park, but I think I know what those fans were doing. They weren't booing Piazza -- it may be Nostalgia Week at Shea, but nobody's nostalgic for nearly running a Hall of Famer out of town in the summer of '98. They were booing their fellow fans who were still cheering -- playing out, in 49,000+ instances of voting with hands or lungs, the family feud that gripped us earlier today. The same one that gripped any other Met blog and countless Met households and was fought around umpteen watercoolers today.

How can you be cheering for a guy who's trying to beat us? If he hits one we're down 5-4 and Pedro doesn't get a win! And man, there's a lot of baseball left to play -- this team hasn't won a damn thing yet! What are you, nuts? Don't you have any brains?

What? How can you not be cheering for the best position player we ever had? Day game tomorrow -- this could be the last time you ever see him! And we're so far ahead in the standings it's not even funny! What are you, nuts? Don't you have a soul?

I was thinking that was the perfect moment to freeze, but it's not. That came one pitch and a few seconds later. The ball's left the bat in an awful hurry, gone rocketing by far over the heads of the Joses, Carlos B. is moving onto the warning track, eyes on the sky, tracking its trajectory. Gonna be close.

And...STOP.

So. Where do you want that ball to land?

Maybe you're saying, screaming, pleading that it needs to find Carlos's glove -- for Pedro's W, for the team's march to October, for the sake of finding a role for Heilman, for the simple reason that the guy in the wrong uni hit it. That's OK. I'm on your side. Lots of other smart folks and diehard Met fans are too.

Maybe you're hollering, whooping or cheering for it to bank off the camera tower, for Gary to yell that it's outta here -- one of Mike's final bits of tape in a storied career, a nice bit of closure, another unforgettable night at Shea, the happiest L you'll ever take. (And hey, we could still win it.) That's OK. I'm not on your side, but lots of other smart folks and diehard Met fans are.

Or maybe you have absolutely no idea what you want to happen. And you know what? That's OK too.

It landed in Carlos's glove. We won. Twenty-four games over .500. Heilman got the job done. So did Wagner. (Neither was a model of execution, but this year I've taken a lesson from my co-blogger: There's no column in the standings for style points.) Endy gave us more evidence he can play. We got to see another how'd-he-do-that work of art by Pedro. Got to cheer for Mike, or at least smile. Saw a visiting player get a curtain call, of all things.

Not a bad night, even if it did come with a scenario that couldn't have been more perfectly designed for an intra-Met-family squabble. Heck, that's OK too. It's not abortion or Iraq or whether or not to tip on tax or any of the terrible searing quarrels that bring out the long knives. Just a baseball argument among adherents of the same faith, and an academic one at that.

Besides, we should be so lucky. Tomorrow we might have to cheer for Michael Tucker.

The most telling sign of Mike Piazza's status upon his return to Shea Stadium was the graphic posted on DiamondVision in advance of the sparkling "In My Life" video tribute. There was a circular icon with a 31 in the middle. The numbers were blue, the trim was orange, the numerals were adorned with pleasing pinstripes.

That's right: A retired number. It was an implicit public promise that what we all think should happen will happen, barring long-term memory loss on behalf of ownership or the re-emergence of Kelvin Torve. No. 31 will go up on a wall, here or next door, alongside the ones you know in your sleep: 37, 14, 41 and 42. Without dredging up dozens of fun but tangential arguments on behalf of removing 24 and 17 and 6 (what, no Orsulak?) from active duty, 31 getting Stengeled is so appropriate that Miss Manners could emcee the ceremony.

Until then, we'll have to make do with turning our own backs on Mike Piazza. Thirty-Ones were in full effect last night, tens of thousands doing as I did and diving into their jersey and tee collections to break out a classic (though one joker in my section invested in a Padre road top with 33 and MET FOR LIFE on the name plate). We're on the same page with the Wilpons here. We're all respecting 31 however it's embodied.

This, by the by, is something the Dodgers won't do as is evidenced by their assignment of 31 to Brad Penny, so let that end any notion that an LA can adorn Mike's HOF cap...and how in bloody hell does Brad Penny get to keep wearing 31 when Greg Maddux is on the same team? Not our problem, but tacky.

Mike should receive the digital honor of honors just for pulling off the neat trick of returning to Shea and maintaining virtually every fan's loyalty while not pulling it at all away from the home team. The 2006 Mets get an assist there, too. In other not so long ago years, the crowd could be easily swayed against the Mets if one charismatic personality alighted in the wrong shirt. It is to Mike's credit that his Met popularity is rock solid. It is to the Mets' credit that last night didn't devolve into a late-'90s Merengue Night fiasco when even a Felipe Alou could turn a plurality of attendees into raucously supportive Montreal Expo acolytes and there wasn't enough of the royal we to convene a critical mass on behalf of our guys.

By the same token, in other years and on other nights, contagious amnesia has been known to break out. I was bemoaning to my friend "Other" Jason last night that I was here for the returns of Alfonzo and Olerud (and, we determined as I reminisced, most of the '99 Mets), and they were all treated like gray-suited strangers by almost everybody but me.

Say, who's that vaguely familiar character batting for the other team?

Oh, just somebody who used to work here. Pay him no mind and root for Tyler Yates.

But Tuesday with Mikey was invigoratingly different. The love in the room was intoxicating, the priorities were sober. Let's Go Mike and Let's Go Mets: concurrent emotions sung in perfect harmony. Nice job.

Having established that Mets fans don't always turn their old heroes into hero sandwiches, I am now left to wonder about some other sentiments expressed at Shea in recent nights and why we en masse think the way we do.

He's slightly old news, but what was with the booing of Chase Utley Friday night? Co-blogger and I were just reaching our seats Friday when Utley of the 35-game hitting streak was announced. You'd think Chase was a Pennsylvanian abbreviation for Chipper. Ya gotta be kidding me — we're booing Chase Utley for his recent spate of excellence? Talk about tacky. Worse than tacky...it's Yankee. It's Juan Gonzalez hitting a couple of home runs in the '96 playoffs and then becoming Public Enemy No. 1. We did the same thing with Utley, except without flinging Duracells at his head (can't beat that Yankee tradition).

Whatever happened to "Here comes that Man again"? Brooklyn fans may have hated what Stan Musial did to their Dodgers (owning them), but they recognized they were witnessing a great player and they applauded him. Didn't don Cardinal 6 jerseys as far as I know, but they respected him. When I was a kid, Mays the Giant and Aaron the Brave were above spiteful booing. You see an immortal among us and you clap.

What's that? Utley ain't them? No doubt. But Utley was doing what Pete Rose was doing in 1978, hitting every night and nearing history. Pete Rose really had been Public Enemy No. 1 in these parts since October 8, 1973; he still hasn't been forgiven for upending Buddy Harrelson. But when he came to Shea with the National League hitting streak record in sight, Mets fans — and not just the frontrunners who infect big events — saluted his feat. 1978 was like 2006 in one respect: There were no real ramifications in this for the Mets. If Rose had gone hitless, those Mets still would have sucked, just like if Utley had singled Friday night, these Mets would still rule.

You didn't have to root for Chase Utley to keep at his skein successfully (though why you wouldn't want a Yankee Clipper toppled clear out of the record books is beyond me), but you really couldn't take a moment from preserving the integrity of Metdom to put your hands together a few times and say, "hey, you're a real good player accomplishing a pretty great thing...now strike 'em out Duque!"? There has to be an aesthetically satisfactory middle ground between the Stockholm Syndrome that turned New Yorkers into home run whores for McGwire and Sosa and the brainless state that dictates anybody who's the enemy has to be fully and frontally attacked.

Listen, I cheered real hard when Pedro Feliciano put an end to the streak. Just because I admire what Utley had done doesn't mean I wanted to actively encourage him to succeed at our expense. But I also applauded him for having gotten that far. It's not that hard.

If you don't care for Pete Rose, maybe Axl Rose will do it for you. I'm thinking in terms of the acoustic G N' R of "Patience," as in take it slow, things will be just fine. Consider this a long-distance dedication to the fans who are pumping up the volume, notch by disturbing notch, on booing Lastings Milledge.

Remember him? He's the extremely talented rookie you loved approximately two months ago. He's apparently been optioned to oblivion in your estimation because the Lastings Milledge at Shea on this homestand isn't being offered any high-fives down the right field line.

I won't argue that Milledge isn't showing nagging indications of shrinking into Jason Tyner, Size 2000, right before our very eyes. There is a growing process here and with growth comes pain. Thanks to Miami DUI fucker Cecil Wiggins, Milledge is back before his time. He's learning at the highest level and the lessons are complex, but I and, more importantly, those who evaluate talent for real think he's capable. Heck, even Jason Tyner is playing for a contender (the Twins) these days.

So why is Lastings Milledge being booed like he's Chase Utley without portfolio? I sensed a smidge of it on Sunday night and it definitely built into something noticeable by his final fruitless at-bat Tuesday. Booing Royce Ring is silly enough, but I get that: Reliever comes in, gives up hit, you react. Unnecessary, but instinctive. This Lastings thing feels like something else, as if the eighth-place batter in your first-place lineup is really becoming a bane of your existence. Because he's got a touch of the Mendoza? Because he leapt and missed for Geoff Blum's homer like Ron Swoboda did Don Buford's? Because his body language isn't as upWright as you'd like?

I can only conclude that there's a significant swath of Mets fans who need to be down on at least one of their own at all times. It ain't gonna be the left-side youngsters with the big contracts and, because they've performed so effectively, it ain't gonna be one of the Carloses (Beltran we've always showered with adoration, right?). Lo Duca is more of a folk hero than ever for being somebody else's unreasonable target. Cliff has always been blessedly immune to anything more than mild "he's hurt again?" grumbling. Booing Jose Valentin didn't harm him, the bastard. Endy Chavez never had a chance to be disliked, what with his good playing and such. Trachsel's monumentally boring but regularly victorious. Billy Wagner refuses to screw up every chance he gets. Aaron Heilman and Chris Woodward didn't play last night. Eli Marrero has left the building.

I see. It's all about to be Lastings Milledge's fault.

Whatever it is.

Quick, who is your all-time favorite San Diego Padre?

It's a trick question because you can't choose Mike Piazza. Mike Piazza isn't a San Diego Padre.

If he were, why would have I heard myself say quietly and routinely, "c'mon Mike," as he worked the count against Steve Trachsel in the top of the second? It was the natural thing to do. I'm in the mezzanine, Mike's hitting cleanup, I want him to get a hit. It's an act he and I perfected from 1998 through 2005. At this point it's instinct.

I'm not talking about the long standing ovations that accompanied his every step from the bullpen to the third base dugout to behind the plate to the box at its left. That stuff was predictable. Thrilling, but predictable. It was within the context of the game — after a video detailed his myriad Met accomplishments, after the PA announcer uttered his name, after Jimi Hendrix strummed the first notes of "Voodoo Child" in an unprecedented playing of a visiting batter's theme song — that Mike Piazza surprised me. He got me to mindlessly root for him during a Mets game in 2006 merely by showing up at Shea even though he batted in the top and not the bottom of an inning.

Mike Piazza comes to Queens, I root for him. I don't even think about it. What's a road uniform between friends? Mike Piazza, it's been established here, there and everywhere, will always be a Met. I root for Mets.

But who the hell is Adrian Gonzalez?

That's the San Diego Padre first baseman, the San Diego Padre fifth-place batter, the San Diego Padre who followed Piazza in the San Diego Padre order. And when Trachsel retired him in the top of the second, I let out a little "damn."

The guy batting fifth after Piazza, whether it was Brian McRae or Robin Ventura or Jason Phillips or Cliff Floyd or whoever, was always someone I wanted good things for and from. They were Piazza's teammates. Root for Piazza, root for his protection.

Wait just a New York minute now. Adrian Gonzalez is a San Diego Padre. I have no interest in this Friars club. So what the Tuck is he doing in the same lineup as Mike Piazza? Mets game...Shea...mezzanine...cleanup...Piazza...cheers...undying affection...endless applause...

Go figure.
I did.

It took me an instant but I quickly curbed my instinct and understood that Adrian Gonzalez wasn't a part of any of this. Him I could root against. Ditto Todd Walker and Geoff Blum and Josh Barfield. Having finally snapped to and paid attention to the entire tableau, I established a handy protocol for the Takin' Care of Business portion of the evening.

Mets in Mets uniforms: hope for something positive.

Padres in Padres uniforms: wish them nothing good.

Mets whose uniforms got mixed up in the laundry: cheers...undying affection...endless applause...