Oh that baseball, it is a funny game. One night it's as tense as can be. The next afternoon, it is ludicrous. A laugher for one team, an entity lacking humor for the other.

Joke's on us this time. When your best chance to stay competitive is to send Ramon Castro from first to home with two out down ten in the fifth, you try to chuckle and keep a smile on your face.

What over? Not Pelfrey, except maybe the thought that an off day means he is skipped a turn which means, in turn, Coach Rick can run him through a few more of his magical "bullpens" and perhaps yield Ollie-like miracles. Not Sele or Burgos either, each of whom lost the keys that keep a door shut. Not much on our side of the ledger (Reyes revives, Endy endures, Green gratifies) that accounted for beans in the scheme of things.

But try to find a good thought or two for our counterparts in Colorado, the serious Rockies fans who are lapping this one up and downing it with a cold clean Silver Bullet. I'm sure they're out there, I'm sure they needed this.

I don't have any particular use for the Colorado Rockies, but it's rather sad to see what's become of them over the last decade or so. They were the model franchise in waiting when I visited them in their spanking new playpen a dozen years ago, en route to the first National League Wild Card, performing marvelous offensive feats nightly in front of adoring throngs. Beyond conferring resident scholar status upon Superintendent of Schools Mike Hampton and installing that humidor (or humid-id-or, as Keith memorably called it last summer), I don't know what the hell happened to them. Nor do I much care. I sure won't when we're subject to Coors Field fireworks when the Mets are in Denver around the Fourth of July.

Still, bad for baseball that the most promising of its four most recent expansion markets has lost its elevation. You should have seen the Rockies fans in 1995. They were so enthusiastic, so into their duel with the Dodgers for first, so full of hope and passion. There hasn't been an N.L. West race since then that has involved them in any meaningful fashion.

They do seem to have a molehill if not a mountain of young talent: Atkins, Holliday, that irritating shortstop with a rifle for an arm and a howitzer for a last name...Tulowitzki, yes, that's it. Sprinkled in are admirable vets (Finley), annoying vets (Mabry), pesky vets (Carroll) and insanely overpaid vets (Helton). Their pitching is anybody's guess considering the altitude they spend half their time hurling through. It's looked good for two days, though.

The names may have been moved around but this is basically the same jumble of Rockies that comes to Shea every year and doesn't win too often. Colorado last recorded a victory here amid Mike Piazza's last appearance as a Met at the very end of 2005. Before then, their previous win was a Sunday in May 2002. How long ago was that? It was so long ago that Kane Davis took the loss.

Nowadays, to the extent we dare to be at all presumptuous about our standing in the sport, we sort of, kind of expect to beat teams like the Rockies. It wasn't long ago when we were the Rockies, expecting absolutely nothing but hoping like hell that our Phillipses and our Wiggintons and our Seos were going to mesh with our Piazzas and our Floyds to create a better tomorrow. When we'd rise up and take a game or — holy crap! — sweep a series, as we did from Colorado in August 2003, we'd cherish every inning and hold it as tightly to our collective bosom as we could until reality snapped back and slapped us in the face.

I'm pretty damn stingy about giving up games, but considering it's already gone, I'm willing to loosen my grip on this afternoon's for the sake of fans I've never met in a place I haven't been in a long time. They could use one.

Enjoy it Rockies fans and build on it. You play the Braves next.

Have you ever squealed in the literal sense? An honest-to-goodness squeal? Like a pig?

Have you ever pursed your lips and let out an "oooh!" like you were really amazed?

Have you ever reflexively combined a squeal and an "oooh!" again and again? It might sound something like this...

SQUOOOH! SQUOOH! SQUOOH! SQUOOH!

That was me when Endy put down the bunt that ended the game in the twelfth. It was really loud, too. Woke up the wife and everything. She's the one who pointed out to me during Game Seven that Endy's catch elicited a Warner Bros. sound effect from my throat. That was more an "uhAAH!" then an "oooh!" and less a squeal than a Hamilton Beach blender set on grate.

uhAAH! uhAAH! uhAAH! uhAAH!

Endy Chavez should go into ADR when he's done playing, which is to say not for a very long time.

Of course Endy is about more than sound effects. He's about sound baseball. It's easy to take him at his leaping essence after he demonstrated The Strength To Be There last October 19, but as if we've forgotten, he's a helluva player no matter what he's doing out there. A helluva thinker, too.

Anybody can be blessed with speed (well, anybody but me and Ramon Castro) but Endy also has the gift of vision. He saw Clint Barmes playing back at second. He saw the drag bunt as a legitimate winning possibility. And he took what he saw.

That's thinking. The Mets are good at that. The Met you tended not to think about before Tuesday night is a prime practitioner, or so we learned. No doubt a clever drag bunt into the devil's triangle bounded by first, second and the mound is using your head as well as your feet. But a ball clean-and-jerked well over the left-centerfield fence? Damion Easley gave that one some thought and revealed it wasn't just brute force at work.

Just after the game, SNY's Kevin Burkhardt asked Easley what he was thinking about up there when he tied it in the tenth. Maybe because Damion had had two full innings to contemplate the answer or maybe because he has plenty of time to think in his job, he had a great and thorough answer.

"I'm just tryin' to relax," he said, walking Burkhardt and us through the whole at-bat, how he took one pitch that he shouldn't have and then swung at one in his eyes that he was still obviously annoyed by. So he relaxed and he eventually got to Brian Fuentes, admitting later on "I kind of expected it to go out."

The Shot Heard 'Round Ten O'Clock may not have been the most dramatic home run in baseball history but Easley's thought process was remarkably similar to that of another New York National League slugger who delivered in a late inning once. Bobby Thomson has been asked to replay what was going through his mind when he approached the plate to face Ralph Branca on October 3, 1951 probably thousands of times. The answer is always terrific: "I kept telling myself not to get overanxious...give yourself a chance to hit."

In other words, relax. I thought of Thomson when I heard Easley. I thought how little baseball changes in the way these guys have to think their way through game situations no matter how much talent they may have. I thought, too, of how Jose Valentin was thinking clearly when he laid down a less celebrated but just as crucial bunt as Endy's in the twelfth, the perfect sacrifice that moved Shawn Green from first to second. I even thought Ryan Speier was as heads-up as he could possibly be in trying to flick Endy's dachshund of a drag to Helton with his glove. It didn't quite make up for his maybe-thinking-too-much balk that pushed Green from second to third, but it was admirable in a desperate sort of way.

I also like how Willie Randolph thinks. When he was asked if this was his favorite game of the year, the manager did not sound like a fan. No, it was not his favorite — we left too many men on base for that. Good point, one he's paid to remember, one we are free to forget, though I must confess I wondered as the zeroes were applied to the scoreboard how it was possible that two Major League teams, one of them our certified offensive powerhouse, couldn't score for nine innings. Good pitching beats good hitting, but good hitting is good hitting. We're just so used to scores like 7-2, 9-6 and 6-1, that 0-0 administers a shock to the system.

Though 2-1 is the balm that ensures a sound night's sleep.

***

Say, here are the complete Major League standings through last night, April 24, 2007. Let me know if you notice anything similar to those for the close of business from September 3, 1990.