Art Howe was a fine man with the misfortune to be rather seriously miscast as manager of the New York Mets. But his finest act might have come on Oct. 3, 2004, in his final inning at the helm. (Which also happened to be the final inning in the history of the Montreal Expos, and the endpoint for various other histories. I'll get to all that.)

Joe Hietpas had been called up from Binghamton in mid-September as an emergency catcher, though 2004 was so horrible that most any position could have been considered manned on an emergency basis. He was 25, and known as a defensive whiz, but an indifferent hitter if you were in a kind mood. (Seriously. Look at his minor-league stats and see if you can call the offensive glass one-eighth full.) Here he was nonetheless, waiting for the backup catcher to get injured, waiting for his shot in the Show. Waiting. And waiting some more.

I got used to seeing Hietpas on TV and from the stands as the season sputtered to an end -- he'd be right there in front, leading on the dugout railing, staring at the field. It went from vaguely comic to decidedly tragic: Couldn't Art find a place for Young Joe, the Forgotten Catcher? Some absurd blowout, some extra-inning tilt, some something? Nope. The second half of September went crawling by, and still that dugout rail separated Joe Hietpas from where he wanted to be.

On the last day of the season, I was there in field-level seats with Greg and Laurie, saying farewell to a hideous Mets season, farewell to never-again Mets Todd Zeile and John Franco, farewell to a well-intentioned but unfortunate choice as Met manager, and farewell to a franchise treated like a stepchild by the sport that should have done right by it. But what I really wanted was to say hello to Joe Hietpas.

Hietpas had warmed up pitchers between innings before -- a routine duty for backup catchers, but one made particularly cruel by his situation. But this time, in the top of the ninth, he was staying. At the last possible moment, Joe Hietpas was getting his shot. He'd catch Bartholome Fortunato, raising his own curtain as the Mets lowered the curtain on the season. It was 8-1. Fortunato got in a bit of trouble, and I briefly entertained ridiculous imaginings: The Expos would spit in Bud Selig's eye by scoring seven runs, staving off their own extinction, Greg and Laurie and I wouldn't have to say farewell to baseball quite yet. And sometime in extra innings Hietpas would bat -- and crack one over the fence to send us all home.

Why the heck not?

Nah. With two men on Fortunato gathered himself, struck out someone named Josh Labandeira and struck out Maicer Izturis and then got future friend Endy Chavez to ground out, Keppinger to Piazza. John Franco's Met career and Todd Zeile's career and Art Howe's Met tenure and the Expos were history. As, in all likelihood, was Joe Hietpas.

Hietpas got a baseball card the next spring, a rather optimistic declaration from Upper Deck SPX that he was an SPXciting Rookie, and went back to the bus leagues. Where he offered a mathematician's degree of proof that he couldn't hit: .216, ,194, .130 and .185 in tours of duty over two years with Binghamton and Norfolk. With Paul Lo Duca and Ramon Castro hitting up a storm for the big club, it was obvious his fate was to be the Mets' Moonlight Graham.

So Hietpas tried what more than a few guys who get called into the office and told the grim facts try: He said something along the lines of "Hey skip, I can pitch."

Only he actually kind of could: It didn't go so well for one inning with the Tides in '06, but down at St. Lucie last year, Hietpas put up a 2.47 ERA in 43.2 innings. He didn't strike many guys out, and he gave up a lot of hits, but hey, he didn't walk a lot of guys, either. And then there he was today, cleaning up after a parade of Met minor-league pitchers. In a Met uniform again. Pitching.

At this point, it's time to ignore some inconvenient facts. Like the fact that he was wearing 92. Or is in A ball with his 29th birthday soon to arrive. Or that his stuff was consistently up in the strike zone, and hit all over the place by Braves borrowed from minor-league camp, with only the unlikely glovework of Fernando Tatis and boneheaded Atlanta baserunning saving him from ugly results.

Never mind all that. It's March, whatever the Red Sox and A's are doing on the other side of the world in the nighttime. March is the time for ignoring inconvenient facts, and letting yourself imagine: Late summer '09, Hietpas trots in from the Citi Field bullpen as the latest middle reliever to get a shot as the Mets try to defend the title they won in saying goodbye to Shea. (I know, we're imagining a lot. Stick with me.) He throws an OK inning, and as he's sitting on the bench Reyes and Wright and Beltran and Teixeira and teammates start hitting rockets everywhere. A close one has turned into a rout, and Willie's decided not to burn up the bullpen for this farce. Hietpas goes to the bat rack. Borrows somebody's lumber. Finds a helmet. Steps into the on-deck circle. Then walks up to the plate.

"You know Keith," Gary says with the first hint of arch in his voice, "he was drafted as a catcher."

To be estranged from your favorite Met is strange. I know. I've been sort of on the outs with mine since last September.

I still wear my three REYES 7 t-shirts; my overpriced Jose Reyes button is still affixed to my plush home run apple; no Met has been elevated above him in my esteem, official or otherwise. Yet Jose Reyes and I haven't communicated much since things unraveled. I haven't lit up at the thought of him, haven't embraced the sight of him, haven't Jose-Jose-Jose'd hardly at all. And Jose hasn't really reached out to me.

Is there hope for us yet?

The annual day of renewal is at hand, so the benefit of the doubt must be issued. On Opening Day, Jose Reyes will bat first in Miami and I will put my hands together and he will take it from there. There's no point going to bed angry at your favorite Met and emerging from hibernation in the same old snit. I've been down on Jose since September, down in a way I didn't think was possible, down for reasons I can fathom but don't like doing.

The Mets as an institution did not do themselves proud when last they played for money and honor. You can count on one hand the individuals who bathed themselves in glory and have enough fingers left over to tell Jimmy Rollins what he can do with his portfolio of predictions and pronouncements. We were laid waste by a teamwide epidemic, but with the exception of a certain undevastatable lefthanded pitcher who doesn't live here anymore, nobody was more of a poster child for determined underachievement than Jose Reyes.

My favorite Met sparked everything good about the Mets in 2006, just as he had since coming to the big leagues in 2003. If, in between, he wasn't as polished as some would have liked, it was just a matter of time, I swore it was. He was a work in progress, like young Jed Bartlet in the "Two Cathedrals" episode of The West Wing when Mrs. Landingham told him that he missed a spot.

I didn't miss it. I just haven't gotten to it yet.

Jose got to it by '06 and in the first half of '07 he was on it but good. Then he got off it. The National League Player of the Month for April was nowhere to be found come September. It wasn't that he sucked (which he did), it's that he was almost on a mission to suck. He swung mindlessly, he ran recklessly if at all and he...he just wasn't Jose Reyes anymore. He was some time-marking pod person counting down to when he could ditch this stupid game and this stupid team and go hunting and fishing and maybe gravedigging. He comported himself like a latter-day Richie Hebner, for crissake.

I look at certain Met holdovers and I cringe a little for this year given how last year became last year and whatever troubling dispatch has wafted north from St. Lucie. Has Delgado completely fallen apart? What to make of Wagner's back? Beltran's limbs? Is the perpetual cold shoulder vis-à-vis being the one guy with the potential to fill the fifth-starter role yet never again given a chance going to catch up to Heilman? Is Ollie's arm OK? His head? Will Wright, as blameless as a Met could be as everything around him withered, have the strength to start it up and carry that weight again? Or will he be reduced to churning out quotes about how we're all out there giving it our best, Willie knows what he's doing, my circuits are fine, this does not compute? Contrary to how it looks sometimes, even David Wright is human.

Jose Reyes is way too human, it turns out. Jose Reyes has months, maybe even halves of seasons when he's not superhuman, when he's not the whirling dervish of home-to-third legend, when he's not beating out ground balls because he appears interested only in beating it out of town. He's having a nice March — every time I see a highlight, he's diving into something — but he had a fantastic early 2007 and in the end it amounted to a hill of nothing. No, it was worse than nothing. It was alarming the way he phoned it in on offense and wasn't nearly enough of an Ordoñez to make it up on defense. I was alarmed. I wonder if he was.

Does all that just go away now? I've seen him interviewed. He's smiling the Jose smile. He says everything is fine, everything is dandy. He looks a good bit like the Jose Reyes with whom I fell truly, deeply, madly in baseball love five summers ago. But I stare hard and I see the Jose Reyes from a September to dismember and I struggle to see the leadoff hitter of my dreams and the man who's gonna get on first base enough to get us back to first place enough.

Come back Monday, Jose. Come back for real. All will be forgotten and forgiven if you do.