Did I just watch a Met-Yankee game that lasted only 138 minutes? No wonder the Yankees lost. That's the fourth inning in the American League.

Oliver Perez may be demonstrative to the edge of flamboyant, but he doesn't screw around. Ollie proved the slightly more substantial 46 versus National League veteran Andy Pettitte. Pettitte was good. Perez was better. Endy was awesome. Smith and Wagner were tidy.

And that's basically all that happened. What, you expected more from a Subway Series showdown at Shea?

This is all I needed.

If you're taking care of old business every week, then it must be Flashback Friday at Faith and Fear in Flushing.

Monday marked the 35th anniversary of Willie Mays' debut as a New York Met. And the 35th anniversary of Willie Mays' homecoming as a New York baseball immortal.

The two events were not coincidental.

The Mets weren't picking up any old part-time OF/1B on May 11, 1972 and inserting him into the lineup against the San Francisco Giants to see what he had left — a home run to beat his former team right off the bat — three days hence. This wasn't Julio Franco deeded a roster spot on egg whites, intangibles and the occasional pinch-hit. And by the same token, these weren't the Houston Astros or Chicago White Sox or any random might-be contender making a potentially shrewd move to shore up its bench.

This was Willie Freaking Mays. This was the best player who ever played baseball maybe. Certainly in the discussion. They've been playing professional baseball since 1869. Think about that.

Willie Mays is one of the best players, possibly the best player, in a sport for which records and recollections have been kept and studied and obsessed upon for about 140 years. More than 16,000 men have been classified as major leaguers. If you were conducting a countdown of the greatest of the greatest, you'd discard all but a few fingers' worth before attempting to properly appraise Willie Mays.

Willie Mays played in the National League because there wasn't a higher league available. Willie Mays is in the Baseball Hall of Fame because there isn't a more hallowed place to commemorate him. There is nobody alive, save perhaps for Henry Aaron, who has a plaque in Cooperstown who would accurately tell you he belongs on the same level as Willie Mays. Nobody.

Willie Mays played in two cities for two franchises. One franchise that represents one city chooses to acknowledge its history with Willie Mays by according him its highest honor, the retirement of his uniform number. One franchise that represents one city chooses not to.

The New York Mets...repeat...the NEW YORK Mets have abandoned a sacred civic responsibility. They have treated Willie Mays' tenure as a New York Met and, just as importantly, the greatest baseball player to wear a New York uniform in National League play as a footnote for most of the past 35 years.

This treatment should end immediately. Willie Mays' number should be retired by the New York Mets.

What's that? He wasn't the Willie Mays when he was a Met? I beg to differ. I am moved to this conclusion not only by my sterling memories of what it meant to watch Willie take Don Carrithers deep upon his return but also by a passage from a mid-'80s history of NBC's Saturday Night, written by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad. They explain that one of the least internally loved programs of SNL's glory days was the episode hosted by Milton Berle, long a comedy icon, by 1979 something of a has-been who had not received the memo he was no longer the Texaco star of stars:

Berle's chief defender during the week was John Belushi, no mean mugger himself. Belushi worshipped Berle and repeatedly berated the writers for letting his idol down. "What a great man he is," Belushi said, "and you guys are writing shit for this great man!"

I am John Belushi where Willie Mays the New York Met is concerned.

Go ahead. Tell me he hit .238 in 135 games in 1972 and 1973. Tell me that his 44 Met runs batted in place him four behind Keith Miller and nobody's pumping for the retirement of 25, so why should we retire 24?

Tell me more. Tell me he fell down in centerfield in the World Series. Tell me he was a pet of Mrs. Payson's, that he put Yogi Berra in an uncomfortable position, that his presence all but ended Tommie Agee's career.

Tell me he was only a Met for two years.

I'll tell you on most of that that I don't care. Except for the last part. That I care about a great deal. Willie Mays was a Met for two years. Only two years? How about only two years more than he was anything else except a Giant? And that before he was packed up and off to San Francisco by a bumbling, probably inebriated Horace Stoneham that he was a New York Giant. That he was a New York treasure. That the reason he was back in New York for presumably good on May 14, 1972 was because it was universally recognized that nobody had ever touched the New York National League fan or graced a New York National League diamond like Willie Mays did between 1951 and 1957.

Roger Angell, in his brilliant brief history of the New York Giants for Holiday magazine in 1958:

Baseball writing is a language of superlatives, but the word "exciting" should be reserved for Mays alone. He is the most exciting player I have ever seen, even when he is only running down to first on an infield grounder...He is only twenty-six, and so far in the big leagues he has won titles for hitting, for homers, for slugging, for triples, and for stolen bases. I only hope they cherish him in California, even when he pops up in the eighth inning with a teammate on base. That happens, they should understand, because the Giants are almost always two runs behind in the eighth, so Willie has to try to put one into the seats. We're going to miss him back here.

It's not hindsight to suggest Willie Mays was the antenna atop the Empire State Building in his first go-round in New York. It was the Willie of the '50s that established Willie Mays then and forever. He certainly burnished his immortality in San Francisco before Stoneham accepted cash and Charlie Williams to let him go, but he was a done deal as an immortal here, in New York, in a National League uniform from which the Mets co-opted half their team colors.

You can't say that about Richie Ashburn or Warren Spahn, other Hall of Famers who stopped by to say hi as Mets. It's not the same. The Mets don't have to retire 33 for Eddie Murray just because he's in Cooperstown. This is not about Cooperstown. It's about something more. It's about Willie Freaking Mays.

What a sensation it was in 1972 to have him here. To see the greatest ballplayer in the game in a Mets uniform...at nine years old I was stunned. I didn't know about the New York background except what I learned on the fly. That this was considered the right thing to do made his appearance in orange and blue that much sweeter. That he uncorked a flair for the dramatics on the occasion of our reacquaintance, hitting the home run that made the difference in a 5-4 win over San Francisco made him a Met in my eyes and sealed his New York birthright.

Y'know, if the Mets, amid handing him several going-away prizes on the night of September 25, 1973, had favored him with a uniform top and said "no New York Met will ever wear Number 24 again," nobody would have blinked. Nobody would have argued against it based on his relatively brief stint with the club. Nobody would have brought up his batting average. He was Willie Mays. He was New York. He was the New York Mets as much as any player was those two years to those of us who watched in awe as we became schooled in the Giants-Mets connection. Nobody blinked after 1976 when the Brewers honored Henry Aaron that way, retiring 44, not because he'd been much of a Milwaukee Brewer in the 1970s but because he'd been so much a Milwaukee Brave in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Henry came home after his detour to Atlanta. Henry is still at home in Milwaukee in a manner of speaking. He works for the Braves and the new owners there are going to increase his role but they make a fuss over him in Wisconsin. As they should. As should the Mets of New York over Willie Mays. But they don't.

I don't know why, not really. Is it the famous Wilponian Dodger obsession? Is it Willie's occasional quirkiness that some have called surliness? His departure under idiotic circumstances (he was a greeter for Bally's and was suspended from baseball while he was a come-and-go Mets coach)? His recapture by Peter Magowan and the Giants? I'm not asking the new stadium be named for him, just that he have a bit of acknowledgement inside it.

Besides, who wears 24 for us? Nobody. Nobody could without a really compelling backstory. Two Mets have been issued the digits since 1973: Kelvin Torve in 1990 (accidentally, it was admitted, and he was switched out of them quickly) and Rickey Henderson in 1999 and 2000. Henderson will go to the HOF in a couple of years if he doesn't unretire his body as he's reportedly seriously considering, but it's only the same Hall that Mays is in in name. Rickey was a great. Willie is an immortal. Besides, Rickey, his Wild Card contributions notwithstanding, did not establish himself in New York. If Rickey wants to come back as a Spring Training instructor, let him wear a windbreaker (or let Willie sign off on a Cooperstown exemption). Notice that except for Rickey's St. Lucie cameos, nobody's worn 24 these past seven seasons.

Corey Ragsdale of Binghamton, Greg Mullens of Savannah and Geofrank Parra of Venezuela are all Mets minor leaguers listed as 24 on their respective rosters. They can not wear 24 any longer. That's absurd. No Met minor leaguer wears 37, 14, 41 or 42. None should wear 24. Unless he's Willie Mays.

Nobody is, but he remains the standard. Willie hasn't played for 34 years but when you want to describe a megatool outfielder, who do you invoke? Not long ago, an unnamed scout quoted in the Post compared young Carlos Gomez to Willie Mays. Carlos Gomez plays now, just got here. Willie Mays played long ago. He's still here, in the baseball mindset. It should be made official that he was here, in New York, with us.

Does Keith Hernandez deserve the honor of having his number retired? I think so. Does Gary Carter? Maybe. Darryl Strawberry? Dwight Gooden? Mike Piazza? Tug McGraw? And if Tug's 45 is taken out of circulation, what of the 45 worn by John Franco? And if Piazza's 31 goes, does it go for Franco, too? And wait a sec, how about Pedro Martinez? What does he wear? And Gary's 8 was Yogi's. What do you do there? And what about Davey Johnson?

Great questions. We debate them endlessly. I truly believe that if I wanted to generate oodles of comments on a slow day, I'd just run this headline...

Retire Numbers? My Cable Company Sucks More Than the Yankees

...because those are the three topics that always get Metsopotamians going. At this moment, though, I'm not interested in retiring 17 (though they should have done that long ago) or any of the others. I'm interested in taking care of 24. I can't get Willie's homecoming out of my head. It's 35 years later and it's still breathtaking. The greatest New Yorker, albeit by way of Alabama, comes home and plays the hero. The greatest New Yorker says goodbye to America as a Met because he was a Giant and thus forever links two glorious chapters of National League history. Willie's on deck for the Miracle of Coogan's Bluff. Willie's speaking to a crowd that's Gotta Believe.

There have been 812 Mets in 46 seasons. There have been two who deserve to be called baseball immortals. One is Tom Seaver. One is Willie Mays. There is no defensible way either of their numbers could be worn again by New York Mets. There is nobody like them. We can only hope we have one or two right now who will join them under that umbrella, but right now the umbrella covers just Seaver and Mays. Seaver's 41 is retired. Mays' 24, for all it means to baseball and meant in this city, deserves to be.

I wish somebody who makes these decisions would understand that which is self-evident.

Next Friday: Way on the other side of the Hudson to the No. 6 song of all-time.

What an appetizer for the feast that is interleague baseball in New York: one of those back-from-the-dead games that keep you in your seat or in front of the TV for years.

Eight years, in fact -- we last overcame a four-run deficit in the ninth on May 23, 1999 off Curt Schilling and the Phillies. I remember it well, because I was at Dodger Stadium, watching the Cardinals and the Dodgers duke it out. (Literally -- there was a brawl, which the Dodger Stadium powers-that-be reacted to by playing "Bad Boys," that reggae song from "Cops," instead of pretending nothing was happening, as they do at Shea.) I was scoreboard-watching, and couldn't help noticing that the ninth inning in New York seemed to be taking a long time -- until somehow, the Mets had won. I'll admit I didn't quite believe it -- scoreboard operators could make mistakes about games three time zones away, after all -- so I raced back to my hotel and impatiently waited for Headline News to confirm the amazing details, ending with Roger Cedeno drumming his heels merrily in the dirt as Schilling stared in amazement, stuck with a screeched-to-a-halt 8.2 innings pitched and an unlikely loss.

Ruben Gotay didn't drum his heels, but he seemed happy enough. As was I, needless to say. I'd been paying fitful attention to the TV at work, amused by Willie's ad hoc lineup, mildly impressed by a not-bad start from Jason Vargas, relieved to see Jose Jose Jose being manic in the dugout, a bit sad to see us undone by former Cyclones heartthrob Angel Pagan, but ultimately accepting of what certainly looked like a loss in which bullets would be saved for later in the season.

As the ninth built, I admired Willie for sticking with the JV -- after today, Gotay would storm a machine-gun nest if Randolph told him to. It was a surprise to see Shawn Green called back (let the record show I've cast aside my flirtation with scapegoating him -- too nice a guy), but then I jumped over to ESPN.com to check Batter vs. Pitcher stats and found he was 2 for 22 off Scott Eyre with 10 Ks. Never let it be said that Willie doesn't occasionally look up a stat. Wright may never have pinch-hit before, but he grasped that Eyre desperately needed to throw strike one lest Piniella exile two relievers to the cargo hold on the plane back to Chicago. Mindful of all this, he didn't let that first fastball go by, though it came perilously close to being a diving stab by Izturis and a bang-bang play to double Endy off second and end the game. Then it was time for Delgado to somehow find a hole with Ryan Theriot playing halfway, and he did. Bedlam!

A work pal and I, meanwhile, were carrying on this IM conversation, preserved for posterity. I'm proud of my cheerful confidence, not so proud of my initial lack of faith in Delgado. (Though hey, tell me you didn't think GIDP when that roller came off the bat.)

Brian: who the hell is at bat?
Me: ruben gotay, baby!
Brian: are you kidding?
Me: he's gonna be ruben GODEEP!
Brian: he's hacking away on a guy who cant throw strikes
Me: no worries, it'll happen
Me: see
Brian: i take it all back
Me: lou is going to beat dempster to death on the mound
Me: WHEEEEEEE!!!!!
Me: that was the sound of steam shooting out of lou's ears
Me: delgado will ground into a dp
Brian: youve got DP Delgado up
Me: see above
Brian: he doesnt even look confident anymore
Me: he'll get it done
Brian: omg
Me: my god i love baseball

And now, the Yankees. Should they somehow sweep us, they'll be all the way back to ... .500. Quite an accomplishment. Should we sweep them and some other things go right, we could send them off to the Boston executioner in last place. We'll see how much the morning papers make of our current disparity in fortunes: I could see the army of Yankee media propagandists wallowing in the woes of the Order of the Vertical Swastika, but I could also see the usual hyperventilating about mystique and aura and how the Mets are trying to make this their town but Captain Overrated and his band of hearties will dig deep, blah blah blah.

I'm going to try to ignore it, because that crap's annoying. But it won't work: By first pitch I'll of course have turned myself into an emotional pretzel and be engaged in screaming at the TV, just like every other year. Because what's not annoying about the Subway Series is the jet-engine roar of the stadium completely full and pumping adrenaline, or the way every partisan on either side treats every pitch like life or death for three innings or so until everybody's so tired that they're forced to pace themselves. It'll be a revelation for Joe Smith and Damion Easley and some of the other newcomers; it'll be a reminder for me that underneath all the manufactured nonsense you get three fever-pitch games that an entire city will spend the weekend buzzing about. And that's pretty cool.

Like all good-hearted Mets fans, I wish the Yankees ill -- it pisses me off when they win a spring-training game. I daydream about a generation of lean years, about the V.S. headgear dwindling until it's worn furtively by old men and dim thugs and a few misguided children. (Not so different than now, but we're talking smaller numbers.) I imagine a world in which everything the Yankees did would be automatically compared to a Mets standard, even if that would just be a mirror image of our current daily exhibits of stupidity by lazy sportswriters.

But recently I've begun to wonder if such dreams are really good for us.

The Human Fight once brought me up short by noting, in a discussion of the increasing obnoxiousness of post-2004 Red Sox Nation, that once you're somewhere north of 2 million fans, you're going to attract your share of jerks. It's a very good point, though we shouldn't let it lead us to reflexively scorn newcomers -- each and every one of us had his or her first day as a Met fan, after all. As our renaissance continues, some of those new fans will be true to the orange and blue for life. But some of them -- maybe a lot of them -- will be soulless front runners.

I love New York City, but it's home to a ridiculously large number of such people. Now, soulless front runners are slow on the uptake, the Yankees have been good for a long time, and we've only been good for a short time -- because of all that, most soulless front runners currently fancy themselves Yankee fans. (I guarantee this annoys real Yankee fans, too.) If the Yankees get bad and we stay good, the soulless front runners will indeed take off their Yankee caps. But their next move won't be to hide in their apartments and shut the fuck the up for the rest of their lives, unfortunately -- they'll go out, buy our caps without an ounce of shame, and start woofing about the Mets. This pool of New York asshole semi-fans' sole loyalty is to fashion and the standings. If you're wishing statistical famine on the Yankees, you're accepting that this tide would start washing up on our shores.

Put another way, some of my friends bemoan the march of crappy chain restaurants and touristy bars into New York City. I like to counter with a fervent plea for more such places -- if there were a Planet Hollywood on every corner, it would be like a drain to suck down the clueless, leaving more room for the rest of us at more-interesting locales. The Yankees are the Planet Hollywood of baseball -- a glitzy, soulless, overheated brand name for dolts and louts to gawk at. Close down Planet Hollywood, and those dolts and louts might crowd you out of your local spot. So peace of a sort be on you, Yankees. From now on, I wish you just enough success to keep the mooks hypnotized by your various three-ring circuses.

But not this weekend, of course.