OK, quick quiz: If I told you that the Mets had just swung a deal in Nashville (they haven't), and included a link where you could find out the details, what would be your emotions as you clicked through?

If you chose "anxiety," "despair," "dread" or a similar word as your answer, welcome to the 2007 offseason.

I mean, honestly. Somehow the Collapse of Sept. 30 has only grown since that terrible day, slowly becoming an avalanche wiping out everything in its path. I thought the excision of Tom Glavine, whom any sane person knew could never wear blue and orange again, might cure it. It didn't. I thought the simple passage of time might do it. It didn't. And this offseason of discontent certainly hasn't done it.

I don't know if Lastings Milledge will be the next Manny Ramirez, Rondell White or Alex Escobar. None of us do. But I do know nonsense when I hear it, such as when Omar Minaya stammers that he's improved the pitching staff by adding an old catcher who can't hit and a platoon corner outfielder. Omar referenced the Kris Benson trade in counseling patience, and in doing so accidentally touched on the probable reason for Lastings' exile: off-field issues. But there's a big difference between the Benson deal and the Milledge deal. We all knew Kris Benson's probable future, because we'd seen all too much of his present: At the time (in what may be, for other reasons, the most-trafficked post in Faith and Fear history), I compared him to "a bath that took 20 minutes to fill at the end of an exhausting day and was lukewarm the second you got into it -- not so cold that you pulled the plug, but not warm enough to keep you from repeatedly dunking your knees until you realized you were enduring what you thought you'd be enjoying." Benson was an overpaid, brittle, eminently replaceable journeyman -- his mouthy wife may have been the reason he got run out of town, but his essential uselessness was the reason I didn't care about seeing him go.

Did Milledge have his own off-field issues? Sure, from "Bend Ya Knees" to getting suspended to stupidly waking up the moribund Marlins. When it comes to baseball mores there's a thin line between exuberance and obnoxiousness, and you could usually find that line by locating Lastings and then moving a couple of steps back. Granted. But he was also 22. He had demonstrated enticing ability on a big-league ballfield, he was cheap, and his future was yet to be written. How that kind of player yields a no-stick catcher and a corner guy who needs to stop listening to Bible thumpers is absolutely beyond me. If Omar turns around tomorrow and trades Estrada and Church as part of a package for Erik Bedard, I'll quiet down fast. But do any of us really believe that's coming? Or does the Milledge deal smack of the bad old days, of a hypersensitive ownership that would rather have a mediocre team of controversy-free nobodies than the occasional back-page blowback of a team with an actual personality? This feels like the dismantling of the late-80s teams, like the dead-ass early 00s squads where everybody was whispering in ownership's ear. Milledge is gone, Lo Duca is gone, and I have trouble believing that what we're witnessing are purely baseball decisions.

What's next? What will Omar return from Nashville with? And what will he pay to get it? Will Carlos Gomez and Mike Pelfrey and Philip Humber -- all far too young to write off in my book -- vanish from our ledger? With Santana, Bedard, Haren and the others seemingly out of our reach, what retread with a dull present will their futures be sold for? (Think that's pessimistic? If I'd told you Milledge had been traded to the Nats for two players, would Ryan Church have been in the top five players you picked? And would you have ever guessed Brian Schneider?)

At least there's the free-agent market. Come on down, Livan Hernandez! Plop your indeterminedly-aged body between whatever's left of Moises Alou and Luis Castillo, the oldest 32-year-old in baseball. Luis is here for the next four years -- at which point he'll be playing second base with a walker. Seeing how you're supposedly under 50, Livan, I'm sure we've got at least two years for you too. (Seriously: When we sign Livan Hernandez, just kick me in the head so I'll be in the proper frame of mind to react.)

I'm a Met fan. I've been through plenty of lousy seasons. I've seen a couple of Septembers turn to ash in the final days. But I've never seen an offseason where I found myself bracing for a punch in the gut every time I saw my team's name on the Web. The solution to this, as with so many of life's problems, is for baseball to hurry up and return, even if it's only the sublime pointlessness of spring training. But we just got the first snowfall. It's not even Christmas. And I find myself scared to think what will come by the time we get to Valentine's Day.