Hindsight being 20-20, I should have known we weren't clinching about 11:10 this morning.

That's when Emily and Joshua and I walked into Madison Square Park, home of Shake Shack -- and site of some American Kennel Club carnival that looked like it had been put together late last night by a couple of AKC volunteers who'd been smoking pot and knew this guy who kind of had, like, some A/V gear? The PA -- if you can call one speaker that -- played a succession of calculatedly inoffensive, dog-related hits, like (wait for it) "Hound Dog." Hi-larious! And the AKC folks had forgotten how to play musical chairs. Really, it was avert-your-eyes sad.

But as part of this event, there was the black spot from Friday night -- a Pup-Peroni banner.

Pup-Peroni? What the fuck? Will Paul Maholm arrive and offer to strike me out? Will Jason Bay show up, snatch away my Shackburger and tell me I can't have it until tomorrow?

We should have known, but we didn't. Preparing for our Saturday evening out, Emily and I perused the various Met blogs before (duh) I realized our own blog had a link to Mets bars. (Honest. It's down there on the left.)

I'm not a stranger to booze or booze-related misdeeds. Quite the contrary, in fact, as too many stories and my expanding middle will attest. But baseball and booze don't particularly mix for me. I don't like drinking at Shea because it's expensive, you miss things while peeing, and the subway ride home becomes a horrifying test of bladder elasticity. Bars are better, but the sound's rarely on, after a few I lose track of the little things that make baseball rewarding, and if we lose the boozy belligerence means running the risk of saying something stupid and getting my ass beat by someone a lot bigger and meaner than me.

But tonight was different: The babysitter was coming, Emily and I were headed out, and we needed a Mets bar.

As site of last night's Metsblog frustratapalooza, McFadden's seemed steeped in failure, and was a little too UES for our us anyway. Broadway Dive Bar sounded good, but 102nd Street may as well be in Vermont. I tossed Scruffy Duffy's out because it violated a basic principle -- never go to a bar if you'd be embarrassed to die there and have the name of the bar in your obit. We thought of Loki Lounge in Park Slope, but I'd had a previous misadventure there and wasn't eager to return. In the end, we decided to forget about Mets bars (that said, if anyone has a good one, email us) head down to the northern precincts of Red Hook (Cobble Hill West, if you wanna be all realtor about it) and try the Moonshine, a excellent dive bar just north of Hamilton Avenue with a lovely view of the Brooklyn Motor Inn.

There weren't a lot of Met fans to be found, sad to say -- the Moonshine had Access Hollywood on the TV when we arrived, in fact. But they switched without argument and we sat at one end of the bar and watched most of the game while drinking Stella, munching peanuts, and trying not to be filled with dread. Which all worked just fine while the Pirates kept getting doubled off first and El Duque kept getting out of leadoff-runner troubles.

Emily had a good feeling in the top of the 7th. I'm not sure why. Then, around the 8th (I was drunk by then, so my recall may be off), the black spot appeared: Pup-Peroni. We didn't score. They did. Emily was off to the bathroom before Joe Randa even touched home plate.

Well, fuck. Anyone up for some afternoon champagne?

There are 15 teams who are National League opponents of the Mets. If you're trying to list them, I'll bet I know which one you tend to forget.

The Pirates have faded so far from their glories of the '70s and early '90s, become such a non-factor in the competitive scheme of things and, most relevantly, been scheduled at such odd intervals against us that they're pre-eminently mind-slippable.

But remember a few things as if you need motivation beyond that "1" that just sits there and sits there and sits there.

The Mets have been clinched against five times in their regular-season history, twice at the hands of the Pirates. They won their first and last division titles in our faces in 1970 and 1992 at Three Rivers Stadium. Worse yet, the '70 loss eliminated us (and the Cubs) simultaneously.

(The other three? Expos mini-division in '81, the Braves' 10th consecutive division in '00 and the Marlins' Wild Card in '03.)

PNC Park, the most beauteous of any in the senior circuit, has produced little of value to the citizens of Metsopotamia. We opened the joint in an exhibition series in '01, where the Mets learned of the death of Brian Cole. They were there on 9/11 and returned there a week later to play the first games that followed a national tragedy. The Mets swept but, honestly, who cared that much?

In September 2004, we were introduced to Jason Bay as we were saying goodbye to Art Howe. A nice confluence of everything that had gone wrong for the Mets in the previous couple of years: a budding superstar frittered away in a dopey trade was sticking it to his old team while a manager who never should have been hired and who had just been quasi-fired was sticking around essentially for the free trip to his hometown.

And of course July 8, 2005, probably the most injurious loss, mentally speaking, of the Faith and Fear era.

We need a new memory, a good memory from this place. Tonight.