I haven't broken it to Joshua yet (or Emily), but an hour or so ago I decided the boy is being renamed. From now on he's Daniel Fry. Daniel Murphy Fry. Actually, he's Daniel Murphy Johan Brian Carlos David Luis Fry, but Daniel will cover it.

Murphy -- the otherwise inevitable "Murph" doesn't seem to fit a kid who insists he's Daniel, not Dan -- started his Met life as a cult hero: He went 10 for his first 20, a streak that was clearly unsustainable. But he also showed us that he could work a count and make contact, and demonstrated a welcome seriousness of purpose (there's that "Daniel," again), all of which suggested it might sustain him when he inevitably regressed to the mean.

Regress to the mean? He regressed to the cruel, to the vicious, to the pitiless, riding an 0-for-13 streak into tonight's game, which only meant more than any other game in his young professional life. Struck out looking in the second on a tough 3-2 pitch, failing to move Ryan Church along from second with nobody out. (Church would of course be marooned at third.) Lined out in the fourth, the inning in which no hit would fall. Hit into a double play in the sixth. Played a Pat Burrell liner into a double to start off the Phils' sixth, the inning that would show Johan Santana at his hold-the-line finest. And then, stuck on 0-for-16, he walked to the plate in the eighth inning of a tie game. On the mound? Just Brad Lidge, he of the lethal fastball and slider, he who was somehow invulnerable this year despite his home park being the size of a Pinto.

Was Daniel Murphy scared? When you know the strike zone and can make contact and have made a specialty of meaning business with a bat in your hands, you're not scared. And this was the night -- finally! -- for the Phils' bullpen to regress to the mean. Lidge unleashed a slider that flattened out instead of biting, and was redirected at high velocity down the right-field line. It meant the go-ahead run. It meant the continuing heroics of Carlos Delgado wouldn't go to waste. It meant we could all forget (as best we can) about seven-run leads that turned into nothing. It meant I let out a war whoop in the New Jersey night. And tomorrow it'll mean I go to breakfast here on LBI on a sunny day with my Met shirt on and a big smile for the Phillie fans who had big smiles this morning. Because, of course, it meant first place.

Tuesday night's was the kind of game that's worthy of intricate dissection. But if you attempted to dissect it, you'd just take the scalpel to your eyes in an effort to forget what you just saw.

You wouldn't forget a thing, however. You wouldn't forget how a 7-0 lead became an 8-7 loss across thirteen of the unluckiest innings in inhuman history. You wouldn't forget an offense that operated on bankers' hours, closing after four. You wouldn't forget that Damion Easley had the game of his life and that it was absorbed in a hostile takeover by the game of Chris Coste's life. You wouldn't forget a Hall of Fame starter undone by the schoolyard dimensions of the playground to which he was assigned for the evening. You wouldn't forget the double plays or the lefts-on-base or how three steely innings of Aaron Heilman dissloved into a long single to center off Scott Schoeneweis seconds after the world's first intentional strikeout by Brett Myers.

You'd just be missing your eyes.

So put down the scalpel and by all means protect your vision. You'll need it tonight to see what staff ace Johan Santana does to answer a question that, at Mets 7 Phillies 0, appeared ridiculous: How do we get even in this series and back into first place after probably the worst loss ever etched into the annals of worsts, losses, etchings or annals?

Do what you're supposed to do, Ace. After a Rollinsian debacle of Rogersesque proportions, we require all the help we can afford.