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

Twenty years. Forty-three Fridays. This is one of them.

So you'll be hanging out Monday afternoon, thinking, "Labor Day...holiday...Mets game!" Rethink it. Mets are scheduled for Monday night. You'll have nothing important to do all day long.

But now you will. Because I'm here to remind you that Monday is the perfect time to haul out your nine-disc Mets World Series box that you bought the moment it was released in March.

What? You haven't bought it? Well get out before the weather gets too bad and pick one up. There's no time like the present to lose yourself in this particular past.

Confession: I did buy my box on March 28 but except for the extras, I haven't watched much of it. A little something called the current season got in the way. I can think of a few years when this boxed set would made nice midseason replacement programming. Who wouldn't have rather watched Roger McDowell instead of Roger Cedeño in 2003? Unfortunately, it wasn't available in 2003.

Fortunately, this isn't 2003.

Still, since the extras are smokin' — mic'd up Mike Piazza asking Mookie Wilson about Bill Buckner during batting practice in 2000 and going "dude!" this and "dude!" that like he's Lenny Dykstra's illegitimate nephew is priceless — and since Flashback Friday comes around every seven days, it seemed a good idea to pop in one of the eight games and tell you what's great about it.

Ah, but which one? The set includes all seven World Series contests plus the clincher from Houston. Since we're all familiar with the biggies — the Sixes, the Seventh — and I hadn't much desire to sit through the three World Series losses (why are they here exactly?), that narrowed down my choices to Game Three and Game Four of the World Series. I went with Game Three, one I hadn't seen in any meaningful form since 1986.

Just one inning for now. First I've got a season to finish. Then a nice, long, rewarding postseason, then all the commemorative 2006 product they can churn out. Winter will be endless enough.

Things that struck me:

• Fenway Park was "the dowager queen without a hair out of place," according to Vin Scully. "And at least for tonight, she goes to the ball like a young lady once again." Take that, Joe Buck. Vintage Vin was awesome, very evocative of the Harry Shearer impression in the final episode of last season's Simpsons: "And if you're scoring at home, that saddens me."

• The Green Monster was green. Not a speck of advertising. Fenway wasn't a metaphor or an experience. It was a park. A slightly shabby one at that, but lifesize. I know it's small now, but it appeared tiny then.

• Joe Garagiola said Oil Can Boyd has six pitches. Does anybody have six pitches anymore?

• The 23 on Boyd's back practically enveloped his front. Were the numbers bigger then or was Boyd — "built like the hour hand on your watch," according to Scully — that thin? No wonder he came apart so easily.

• Tip O'Neill threw out the first pitch from a box seat with little fuss. He was cheered. A politician cheered? Vin explained he was retiring.

• Lenny Dykstra's leadoff home run rated one replay. ONE! And it was a reaction shot, Lenny pumping his fist when he saw it was gone. Foul pops get three replays these days.

• The homer was the Mets' first extra base hit of the Series. Two games, no doubles, triples or homers to that point. No wonder we were down two-zip.

• No promos for new NBC shows. Any talk of 227 relates to the Mets composite average, not the hilarious Saturday night sitcom. There are also almost no graphics. Those there are are too big, but they're not torrential and they're not intrusive. I like the score boxes of today, but you can keep most everything else.

• When a bat split, Vin said it was like "that old song". What old song? Why, "Celery Stalks at Midnight". Vin and Joe, a duo I really didn't care for back in the day, are rather comforting 20 years after the fact. They don't overwhelm you. They're older men explaining baseball to you. If not just like Lindsey, Ralph and Bob, then close enough.

• The early 1986 equivalent of "Spahn and Sain and two days of rain" was, noted Scully, "Clemens and Boyd and fill the void." I'll bet it wasn't.

• With Boyd in trouble, McNamara got up Sammy Stewart. Sammy Stewart was a Red Sock? I knew that then, hadn't thought about him since.

• The Sox bullpen, in right field, was in the area that "will forever be known as Williamsburg," Vin said. He told a story about Ted Williams and 1940. For all the nationally televised October games I've seen in Fenway Park the last few years, I don't think there's been a single reference to Williamsburg or 1940. So much for forever.

• Darryl struck out for the 17th time in the postseason. Now it's commonplace for the LDS, the LCS and the WS to be lumped as a single entity. Then it was unusual. And depressingly visionary.

• Dykstra's homer notwithstanding, the signature play of that inning and that game came with Keith on third and Gary on second, one out. Knight bounces to Boggs. Boggs throws home to Gedman. Hernandez is in a rundown. Gedman throws to Boggs. Boggs tosses to the shortstop Owen, covering third, where Carter is approaching. Hernandez slips back into third. Owens turns around. Starts to chase Carter back to second. Turns around to make sure Hernandez doesn't take off for home. Carter retreats successfully to second. Knight? He's on first with a 5-2-5-6-4 fielder's choice. Bases loaded, one out. Then Heep singles home Hernandez and Carter. Mets 4 Red Sox 0.

• Owen was the goat. If you're him, Joe said, "you ask for the salt and pepper and take a bite out of it." Huh? He means 'cause you have to eat it. Vin tut-tutted how sloppy rundowns have become.

• We got two entire replays of one of the oddest, sloppiest rundown —in the World Series, no less — you'll ever see, one before Heep came up, one in the bottom of the first.

• Just before the bottom of the inning commenced, you could hear organ music. Baseball fans were otherwise left to talk amongst themselves between frames.

• As Ojeda began throwing, Scully referred to the 33-inning game he pitched in in 1981 as a Pawtucket Red Sock. "Rather than send you to the history books," he gave us some details. I had the same reaction to "history books," as I did when I watched Good Night and Good Luck and Murrow's boys waited for the early editions to come out: "Why not just go online?"

• "Buck" was "hobbling" but "playing and playing well." Buck was first baseman Bill Buckner. It's impossible to look at Bill Buckner in a Red Sox uniform four days before Game Six and not think of the gleaming ship at the beginning of Titanic. A watery doom awaits both, they just don't know it. The Queen of the Ocean sank the same week as the dowager queen of Boston opened, no?

• Most of all, as I watched this DVD (or any Mets Classic), I responded to every Met move like one of Pavlick's Dogs. Yes, I know the night ends 7-1 and the Series ends 4-3. So what? A Met bats, I tense up. A Met hit falls in, I raise my arms. A Met makes an out, I groan. What's the point of reliving 1986 if you're not going to relive 1986?

Dude!

In lieu of a pennant race, I've been taking this magic number thing pretty seriously. I was flipping madly between the Mets-Rockies and Phillies-Nationals games last night as if a lead, not a countdown, was in the balance. When Marlon Anderson dashed home for the winning run, I treated it as if it were 1973 or 1999, not 2006. (The Nationals treated it like any other day and traded Marlon to the Dodgers afterwards.)

So I'm looking in the paper to see who the Phillies are playing tonight, who becomes our second-favorite team for the weekend, who's going to help us roll toward our inevitable clinch.

The Phillies are being visited by the Braves.

THE BRAVES?

Oh yeech! I don't wanna root for the Braves except maybe to fall down a hole. Which I suppose they have this year. Yes, I will favor a victory by them in Interleague play against one particular opponent, but that's an issue of moral clarity. This is expediency. But it's also icky as all get out.

The Braves are still mildly alive for the Wild Card, so I wouldn't want to endorse anything that would aid them for a single, solitary extra second in their fight to remain on life support. Pull the plug! Pull the plug! But I want to clinch this baby as soon as possible and, quite frankly, I don't care for the Phillies one little bit. We just saw them 10 times in August. I have no need to see them four to seven times in October. I plain don't like them.

But I hate the Braves. We all do. Yet to root for them to lose to the Phillies would be self-defeating. While we may be inevitable, math is math and our job is to encourage subtraction. Ernesto may make my dithering moot, but they'll have to play sometime. (After seeing what tropical storms can lead to a year ago, I won't make any flip remarks about hoping both teams are blown away. But, uh, you know...)

What to do? What to do?

Stop.
Listen.
What's that sound?

BEEEEP! BEEEEP! BEEEEP!

That's the unmistakable noise the Mets express makes as it backs into a magic number of 15. Unpleasant loss for us in Colorado but a crushing defeat for Philadelphia in Washington. The Nats' hero was Marlon Anderson, tagging up from second to third and then practically stealing home on the passingest of passed balls. I guess all that experience Marlon Anderson received as we got our spoil on last September is paying off.

Thanks to him (and no thanks to Oliver Perez), I have 15 things to do right now.

15.01: Paging Mr. Warhol. How big will our roster be by next week? In the near future, everybody will be a Met for 15 minutes.

15.02: Give Us 22 Minutes. As long as WINS has been all-news, we've always been able to rely on sports at 15 after and 15 before the hour. The same could be said for WCBS, I suppose, except they air Yankee games, so WCBS isn't listened to much here.

15.03: Grab Some Pine, Bench. No catcher was better at catching than our No. 15, Jerry Grote. Threw runners out, grabbed every popup, cultivated one of the Terrific staffs of the era. Didn't hit on the level of The Great J.B., but that's hitting, not catching.

15.04: Move Over Jerry Grote. Carlos Beltran is making 15 all his in the Met uniform pecking order. He's making everything else his, too.

15.05: Stay Where You Are George Foster. Was there a bigger disappointment in Mets history? How the hell did that happen? He was so great wearing 15 in Cincinnati, then he was so awful wearing 15 in New York. Why, why, WHY does that ALWAYS happen to us? Oh, except with Carlos Beltran, I mean.

15.06: Why He's Talking To Us Now. Ron Darling won 15 games in 1986, a year after he won 16. Ron Darling becoming a Mets announcer in 2006 still feels as weird as Jerry Koosman becoming one out of nowhere around 1989 would have. Out of sight, out of mind, suddenly on SNY. He's getting better at it, though.

15.07: More Than Enough. The 1986 Mets carried 15 position players into the postseason, using only 14, with Ed Hearn lingering as god-forbid insurance for Carter. That means only 9 pitchers. There's no telling how many we'll carry this year. Seems we've never had less than 12 at any given moment.

15.08: A Little Cliqueish. Remember how in the spring of '87, the Mets starters got together and decided it would be way cool if they all wore numbers in the teens? Doc, Ronnie and Bobby O were already there. El Sid went to 10 and Rick Aguilera wore 15. Alas, Fernandez couldn't be anything but 50 once the season started. Would have you guessed Aggie would go on to have, arguably, the most successful long-term career of the five?

15.09: Positively Gumpy. Two baby boomer touchstones converged on October 15, 1969: Moratorium Day, dedicated to protesting the United States' involvement in Vietnam, and the fourth game of the 1969 World Series. Tom Seaver started against the Orioles. He was also recruited by peace organizers to speak out against the war. Seaver stuck to pitching, going 10 and defeating the Orioles 2-1. The Mets won the Series the next day. America wouldn't withdraw from Vietnam until January 1973.

15.10: New Sensations. By going 15-10, Jon Matlack earned the National League Rookie of the Year award in 1972. John Milner finished third. And if you knew Dave Rader finished between them, you're a crazier motherfucker than I am, Gunga Din.

15.11: Whither the Moonmen? MTV's headquarters is 1515 Broadway. The MTV Video Music Awards were Thursday night. I completely forgot they were on. I used to know stuff like that. I used to know who was nominated and who was presenting and who was doing the outrageous stunt. I used to be young.

15.12: Watching The Mets Wake Up From History. It was 15 years ago that Jesus Jones had a big hit celebrating how the world was changing for the better. Heard it the other night and was impressed how it was really a song anticipating the 2006 Mets: "I was alive and I waited, waited. I was alive and I waited for this. Right here, right now, there is no place I'd rather be." Bob Dylan never blogged about this.

15.13: Let's Never Party Like It Was 1991. At this moment 15 years ago, any combination of Pirate wins and Met losses adding to 20 would eliminate the fourth-place Mets from contention.

15.14: Except For One Thing. Our 15th wedding anniversary is this November. I wanted us to wait until November because, honey, the Mets could be in the World Series again in October.

15.15: Encore For Andy. Gotta go. Warhol says my 15 minutes are over.

It's September 1, so you know what that means. It's the day blogs get to expand their rosters. In preparation for this day, I asked several prospective Faith and Fearers to send me a sample of what they could see themselves writing about the Mets at the beginning of September. I haven't looked at any of them since soliciting them before the season started, so the best way to go about this would be to print the first paragraph from each of them and see if any of them has the insight it takes to cover the daily ups and occasional downs of our powerhouse team on its way to the playoffs.

Here's the first one.

Well, it's September for the Mets and you know what that means. Another lousy season is nearing its end.

No, that's no good. Maybe the next one.

Whatever hopes the Mets had of calling this a good season are about to go down in flames as their annual September swoon takes hold.

That's not gonna do it. Maybe the one after that.

As September gets underway, the only thing there is to look forward to is which minor leaguers get an overdue shot from the Mets. It will be refreshing to see some youngsters play while the struggling veterans sit.

That doesn't apply at all. Fourth time's a charm?

I can't wait to see what deadwood the Mets clear out and who they'll target for acquisition in the offseason. That's what September is for around here, imagining who will be on board next spring and who will be gone after the 162nd game.

Fifth time?

With the Mets hopelessly playing out the string, let's examine what kind of progress we can expect from Eli Manning this fall.

Boy, that's totally inappropriate. Hopefully the next one...

We enter September wondering again where the annual game of managerial and GM musical chairs will take the Mets. Who will Fred Wilpon be introducing in the Diamond Club come October as the next 'savior'?

Or the one after that...

Circle those three dates in the last week of the season, the ones on your pocket schedule, the ones in the white boxes that read ATL. It's where the Mets will go to go down to their annual appointment with disappointment.

Wrong again. I have one more here. If this doesn't work, just forget the whole thing.

Is it just me, or is the race between the Yankees and Red Sox for American League prominence way more interesting than anything the Mets could possibly be involved in?

Wow. I really shouldn't have solicited September blog entries before the season started. Guess we won't be expanding our roster after all.

Preparation is overrated.