Someone go check on the Times' normally sensible Selena Roberts, because something is seriously amiss.

Her off-day column began with the inevitable Yankees comparisons (Wright is "a Jeteresque pinup darling" and yesterday's victory was accomplished "in vintage Yankee style") that I've loathed for years but learn to ignore as the sportswriter's equivalent of throat-clearing. But it's all in service of an idea so profoundly loathsome, so foul and misguided, that it should leave any sensible Met fan shuddering in horror.

The Mets should feel worthy enough to ask, “Why not us?” should Roger Clemens hit the sales rack.

Yes really.

Roberts does get around to enumerating some of the objections to this idea. The Mets don't play in Houston, hometown of His Loathsomeness; weren't his employer on his ascent from the pits of Hell; and don't offer him the kind of comforts the Yankees could -- said comforts apparently being a) the fact that that clubhouse is so suffused with backbiting and bitchiness that the temporary employment of a mercenary wouldn't cause a ripple; b) absolution for drilling hitters; and c) gobs of money in the part-time pursuit of hardware.

That mismatch is undoubtedly enough to sink the idea, thank Christ, but let's keep going. In the 10th paragraph, Roberts notes that "Clemens, in the eyes of Mets fans, is remembered for two things. First, knocking Mike Piazza nearly unconscious with a pitch to the head in 2000 interleague play and then turning the barrel of Piazza’s broken bat into nunchucks during that World Series."

For us, the fact that that oversized, semi-literate troglodyte nearly beheaded the heart and soul of our franchise in a vengeful seizure is Paragraph 1, not Paragraph 10, but Roberts then idly waves that little detail away.

But no player is left from the 2000 Mets. And fans slip in and out of loving and loathing with uniform changes.

And there, all you kids who want to grow up to be sportswriters, is the terrible danger of the press box. Maybe it looks like that when you spend years watching athletes come and go from locker rooms and maybe it sounds like that when all you can hear is the loudest and the drunkest baying below the press box. But the fact that no 2000 Met remains doesn't mean a thing to me, or to any longtime fan worthy of the name. We're still here, and the image of Piazza crumpling to the dirt hasn't receded in memory. I remember it very well, thank you, just as I remember Todd Pratt red-faced with rage back at Shea, the jaw-dropping farce of Clemens and the bat, the tragicomedy of Shawn Estes' semi-revenge, and the Schadenfreude of Clemens getting shelled in the All-Star Game with Piazza as his unwilling receiver. Real fans don't forget these things, and it's insulting to suggest that we do.

Uniform changes? Yes, we can adapt -- Orlando Hernandez and Tom Glavine have found acceptance at Shea. But we're not so cheaply bought. There's no room in the orange-and-blue heart for the likes of Jeter or Chipper or Clemens. And there never will be. Hell, I'm happy that cheap little Ty Cobb wannabe Michael Tucker has been excised from my Met universe. Real fans have long memories and longer-lived loyalties and enmities than Roberts seems to think, and we don't give them up as easily as she suggests.

Roberts gets a quote from Wright ("I know in this clubhouse we don’t have cliques. We go to dinner together.") in noting that the Mets don't have Yankee psychodramas. But not having psychodramas isn't like not having cable. Having escaped them, why on earth would we want to import some? As far as I know, my fridge doesn't have flesh-eating bacteria, but that doesn't mean I'd like you to FedEx me a jar of it. Would the Mets' clubhouse really be improved by importing an aging mercenary headhunter who shows up when he feels like it and is motivated by a combination of Neanderthal rage and lust for another hunk of metal to stick in his trophy case? The Mets, Roberts writes, "can offer Clemens image reclamation". But why on earth does he deserve that? And why on earth should we be his Argentina?

Selena, here's a message from this Met fan: I hate Roger Clemens. And I don't mean I hate him like I hate when it's drizzling -- I think he's a vile human being and wish him ill, up to the limits of whatever human decency I can summon up in this case. Do you know why I hate him so avidly? Because I'm a Met fan.

Needless to say, I don't want him anywhere near my team. Needless to say, if he somehow became a Met, I would not cheer for him. You know what? If that somehow happened, it's possible I might not cheer for them.

Even with just one eye on the set at work, it was clear that Opening Day 2007 was the next Mets Classic. This one had everything: pomp and circumstance, sudden reversals, mild controversy, tension, comedy and a boatload of karma.

It's very, very late and I can barely see, so I'll just let memory be my guide through the highlights. There was Ryan Howard knocking poor Abraham Nunez for a loop after the Phillie infielders chased Cole Hamels out from under Jose Reyes' pop-up, after which Howard looked at his fallen third baseman and threw his hands up like a man who's just whacked into a display of wine glasses at the mall and is very, very sorry -- a play that nearly became a 75-foot triple. There was Ambiorix Burgos winning the kind of epic pitcher-batter battle against Chase Utley that Met pitchers never seem to win -- only to have all his good work unravel on a single splitter that young Mr. Howard nearly hit into Citi Field. There was the meltdown of Geoff Geary, who seemed strangely and a bit disturbingly unmanned by the situation and his surroundings, and the grim mop-up work of John Leiber, who may have Aaron Heilman beat as most disgruntled bullpen draftee. There was Carlos Delgado's sneaky bunt (clever and satisfying, though it eliminated all possibility of a double up the gap -- cue a debate at least as old as Ted Williams vs. Cleveland) and his sneakier slide home by way of the pitcher's mound, a mildly controversial call that the ump got right. (As the umps did on Wright's little dunker that at first looked like a trap.) There was Pat the Bat spitting out chunks of chaw after the end and Charlie Manuel sitting by his lonesome in the dugout long afterwards, like Pedro Martinez all those years ago when he was on the wrong team.

But most of all there was karma. Earlier this week, asked for what must have been the 9,000th time about Jimmy Rollins and his description of the Phillies as the team to beat in the NL East, Paul Lo Duca noted that "in this game, talking usually comes back to bite you."

A veteran fan could tell you that as surely as a veteran: The baseball gods do not generally approve of woofing and predictions, even if they're made to shake up a team with a long history of not being able to get out of its own way. That said, the baseball gods usually don't bring the karmic hammer down quite so obviously or as forcibly as they did today. First Rollins grounded into a double play with the bases loaded. Then he booted the ball that let the Mets tie the game. Then, the floodgates having opened, he stood there while 56,000 taunted him. In a movie, the studio would have sent that back to the writers as too ham-handed a comeuppance. Hell, if Rollins had looked down in the eighth and found himself playing in nothing but his jock he might actually have been relieved. Oh man, this is just a terrible dream. Whew! Think I'll pinch myself and wake up now.

Nope. Sorry Jimmy -- it was all too real.