Instead of being honked off that Michael Imperioli makes for one dismal Met and that Sports Illustrated reports a project centered on "the beer-swilling, cocaine-snorting 1986 Mets" is being passed on en masse in Hollywood (and honestly, would you trust anyone to make that picture?), I'm here to let you know that there's a wonderful Met movie available right now, and you don't have to sit in a sticky theater to watch it.

Order yourself a DVD copy of Mathematically Alive: A Story Of Fandom. It's all about you. It's all about Mets fans.

Documentarians Kathy Foronjy and Joseph Coburn put out a casting call of sorts a couple of years ago, asking on boards and blogs and such for Mets fans who would like to tell their stories. Among those who responded were colorful characters. Thus, colorful characters carry the story forward. If you're like me, you're not a colorful character, certainly not on first impression. In fact, if you're like me, you kind of step aside when you're in the vicinity of a colorful character.

Funny thing, though. Mathematically Alive probes beneath the face paint. While not strictly a profile of superfans, one of the many strengths of this movie is deconstructing them. When you see one of them in a feature on the TV news, usually before or after a big game outside Shea, there is screaming. The superfan screams. People around the superfan scream. This is what big fans of sports teams do if you absorb them in three-second bites: they scream and make asses of themselves.

Not here, however. You can only scream for so long before you begin to simmer down and talk. And beneath the face paint and the wacky outfits and unburdened by the signs and placards, the colorful characters turn out to be fans like the rest of us. We can all relate to eternally loving our team even if we must be wondering why we continue to at this particular juncture of 2007. Our team squeezes us for every spare buck, removes more than 10,000 seats from our future in the name of economic efficiency disguised as modern intimacy, pokes us erratically as we enter the arena, blasts our eardrums with nonsense and, for good measure, trades Lastings Milledge for Ryan Church and Brian Schneider.

Still we show. Some of us show with our faces painted, our quirks on boisterous display, our personal-validation rituals in full force. Some of us need to show the team and the world and each other that we love the Mets more than anybody. Some of us don't need to show it in quite the same manner. We all speak the same language.

Mathematically Alive captures the heart of the Mets fan — our heart — gorgeously. It's sympathetic, not judgmental. It treats particularly extroverted Mets fans akin to how Wordplay treated competitive crossword solvers: good people, special bond, intense endeavor, happy to be among each other. Everybody who is spotlighted, even the ones from whom I might look to move to another seat in the early innings of any given game, won me over. You wear your masks and decorate your cars and cloak your houses and show up first in February for tickets and fire up the tailgating on Opening Day and lure Mr. Met to Rockville Centre to march in a St. Patrick's Day parade and painstakingly position yourself to wave to Mike Piazza all so Mike Piazza will wave back to you for the umpteenth time. I don't do any of that, yet I might as well. We all cheer. We all care. We all love the Mets. I feel you, you colorful characters. We are in this together.

Foronjy and Coburn follow their subjects (some more outwardly calm than others) from the beginning of '05 to the end of '06, right through Game Seven. Of course the afterloss is painful, but there was something that really nailed it for me right before that final contest of the NLCS. One of the movie's recurring colorful characters, identifying himself as a "man of leisure," is interviewed outside Shea. We've seen him sporadically in the course of the film, but now there's something different. He's wearing his Mets jacket and he's ready to go inside Shea. I recognized the aura about him, about everybody the documentary caught up with in the late afternoon and early evening of October 19, 2006. There was a pure energy to those fans in those moments. I don't mean yelling and stomping. They positively crackled. Within that big blue thing lied their fate. They had to get to it, to help their team win.

I know that feeling. I felt it the night before Game Seven when I was there for Game Six; and twice the week before for Games One and Two; and twice the week before that during the NLDS. I always feel it at least a little before entering Gate E. I never feel it sitting at home...except while I was watching Mathematically Alive.

Give or take an unprecedented collapse, we've been pretty lucky of late when it comes to us being us and somebody recording it. We've gotten the movie Mathematically Alive. We've gotten the book Mets Fan. And we've gotten, partially self-serving as this will sound, dozens of really wonderful blogs detailing the fine points of rooting for the Mets. It's hard to believe how much we used to depend on a handful of newspaper beat writers to tell us about the Mets. Beat writers don't tell us anything about the Mets as we tend to interpret them. It is not to impugn their skills nor the narrowly defined jobs they hold to say what they cover is quotes and gossip. There's a place for that, a big one.

But it's not the end game. Documentarians like Kathy Foronjy and Joseph Coburn, authors like Dana Brand and bloggers like a whole bunch of us cover the life. To me, that's what baseball is about: being a fan. I worry deeply about whether the Mets will win or lose every game and I obsess on whether they'll finish first, last or somewhere in between. That gives us our context, to be sure. Yet scores and standings are almost background noise against the act of being a fan itself (except for the Piazza chasers, it struck me how little of Mathematically Alive mentioned particular players; surprisingly, perhaps, they weren't missed). We've established if we've been at this thing we call rooting for as great a percentage of our existences as I think most of us have been that we're Mets fans through thick and thin many times over. We're fans if the Mets are playing a playoff game tonight or if we're nowhere near October. I like that so many able chroniclers of the life have come to the fore to dissect it so well.

The DVD's extras, not incidentally, contain what may be the highlight of the whole package. One by one, dozens of Mets fans contemplate a pair of questions:

What's your best Met moment?
What's your worst Met moment?

It's there that we really get the connective tissue that links all of us. The answers vary, but everybody can relate to what everybody else chooses. This is the family history. This the chapter and verse, whether it's the godfather of ground balls or the most treacherous trade of them all or whatever. Our respective best and worsts don't have to match up. We all know them, we all feel them. We take the good and the bad incredibly personally and we take the good and the bad almost uniformly universally. I realized in watching this section to what extent we as individual Mets fans celebrate together and mourn together even if we've never necessarily sat together.

Visit Vitamin Enriched Films to order the DVD of Mathematically Alive: A Story Of Fandom.