The last man to touch a baseball in a postseason game at Shea Stadium turns out to have been Adam Wainwright's catcher, Yadier Molina. That's really too bad, but really quite appropriate. Molina, you might recall, set the stage one half-inning earlier for everything bad that has happened to these Mets since he caught Called Strike Three on October 19, 2006. In the top of the ninth, he broke a 1-1 tie by driving in the final postseason runs Shea Stadium ever saw with a two-run home run off Aaron Heilman. In the bottom of the ninth, he wrapped his mitt around the final out of Game Seven of the National League Championship Series and ended October for all time at Shea Stadium. The two seasons since have finished, respectively, on September 30 and September 28.

Thanks Yadier.

The Mets dug themselves into a hole that Thursday night from which they've never climbed out. The conventional wisdom is the Mets blew substantial divisional leads in Septembers '07 and '08. I'd contend they were perpetually one game behind from October 19, 2006 on and never made up the ground. The Mets have played their last 324 games in a time warp. It's always October 19, 2006, or at least it was for the last two years. Carlos Beltran is always at bat, the count is always oh-and-two, Wainwright is still just some rookie who can't possibly stop the Mets from meeting their destiny. Beltran is one swing away from tying this thing up, maybe winning it. Valentin's on third, Chavez is on second, Anderson Hernandez, running for Lo Duca, is on first. Surely Carlos will work the count. Surely Carlos will get a pitch he can handle. Surely Carlos will keep the inning going, the game going, the season going. Surely the Mets are going to win this thing.

The names on the backs of the jerseys have been altered some but this organization has spent two years in pursuit of closing that one-game gap. Ownership and general management have proceeded as if this is forever a World Series club in every sense but that of accomplishment. October 19, 2006 is viewed as a cosmic mistake. The Mets were supposed to beat the Cardinals. The Mets were supposed to score more than one run in the seventh game of the NLCS. The Mets were going to send a recovered El Duque to the hill at Comerica Park on Saturday night. They would have it wrapped up by Game Five. The parade would be Friday.

Yadier Molina, Adam Wainwright, Carlos Beltran...a cosmic mistake. Yes, that was it. It was just one game, one bad inning from top to bottom. Hell, it was a good game otherwise for the Mets. The fans voted a catch from it the fourth-greatest moment in Shea Stadium history. The result was the only problem; like Wainwright's final pitch, it was too close to take, too close to accept as indicative of anything but a stutter step across a tear in the time-space continuum. The Cardinals were celebrating at Shea Stadium on the night of the Mets' pennant. The Cardinals were flying to the Mets' World Series. What were the Cardinals doing with the Mets World Series trophy?

A mistake, but a fixable one. An easy fix. The Mets wouldn't have to do too much.

A new leftfielder like Moises Alou will do the trick. Sure he's old, but no more chronically injured than Cliff Floyd. Nothing else really needs to change. Pedro Martinez was injured, but you know he'll come back. El Duque? That rascal, he'll be fine. Gl@v!ne's kind of long in the tooth, but he's motivated to reach 300 wins. We're the Mets. We were in first place all year. We'll be in first place all next year. We'll get past Game Seven this time.

And when that didn't happen, when age proved an irresistible force, when old bones and such didn't mend, when young studs didn't run wild, when only some things went right and then everything went wrong, when it came down to a final day and a must-win and another loss...geez, it was just one game.

This is still a championship-caliber club. It needs a little tinkering, sure. But we came this close without a real in-his-prime ace, imagine what we can do if we get one, if we get the best one...we'll get Johan Santana! Surely he'll be the difference. We'll make some other moves — Lo Duca's getting on our nerves and this Milledge kid is kind of a pain — but substitute Johan Santana for good old Gl@v!ne and we'll be set. Pedro and Duque will come back and Duaner, too. Moises will be healthy and we'll have Luis Castillo for the whole season. We're just one game away from where we're supposed to be.

It's October 19, 2006 talking, seductively whispering into the ears of those who make Met decisions. Forget September 30, 2007 (as if you can). Forget, for a moment, Collapse I. The Mets entered their first legendary seventeen-game swoon at 83-62. A year earlier they were 90-55 at the same juncture. They may have been a first-place club after 145 games in 2007, but they weren't remotely the first-place club they had been after the same number of games in 2006. It wasn't so much that they choked away a seven-game lead last year. It was that they weren't all that brilliant en route to the seven-game lead. The Mets were deteriorating continually after October 19, 2006. The Mets were headed downhill. The Mets may have ended '07 one game away, but it wasn't the game they were convinced it was. That game was Game Seven. The Met mindset continued even after September 2007 to be stuck in October 2006.

Johan Santana was a brilliant acquisition. But you knew he would be. He's Johan Santana. Anybody with the money, some negotiating wherewithal and a few passable prospects could have gotten him. The Mets did. It is to their credit they did. It is to their detriment that he was the only key acquisition the Mets made prior to 2008. Replacing Lo Duca with Schneider and replacing Milledge with Church amounted to barely more than a zero-sum gain. Counting on Pedro Martinez, love him as we do, was folly. Counting on Orlando Hernandez (he was supposed to have the edge on Mike Pelfrey in Spring Training) and Moises Alou, in not even retrospect, was laughable. Counting on Luis Castillo was unfortunate. Counting on Duaner Sanchez was typical. The Mets seem to kid themselves about injuries and rehabilitation. Every one of the aforementioned players except for Alou entered the spring with specific health issues...and, really, isn't Moises Alou a health issue unto himself? Martinez, Hernandez, Alou, Castillo and Sanchez were 20% of the projected roster. None was a full-time contributor in 2008.

Santana can do more than any starting pitcher in the bigs, but he can't make up for five guys. With five guys hurt or struggling or absent, that's five guys you're trying to compensate for. No Orlando Hernandez might have meant a clear shot for Mike Pelfrey, but no Pedro Martinez for significant stretches at a time meant generous helpings of Nelson Figueroa and Claudio Vargas and Tony Armas and Brandon Knight. Sanchez not being the Sanchez he was before getting in that cab meant a strain on a bullpen that was overworked before the season started. Alou's annual disappearance into the mists created the world's largest black hole in left and left the batting order perpetually one gun shy. Castillo's bizarre presence anywhere on the New York Mets' depth chart spoke for itself.

How does a club make a season's worth of plans counting on five very unsure things and consider itself a contender of the first order? Total self-delusion is how. The Mets kept kidding themselves that October 19, 2006 never ended, that Cardinals 3 Mets 1 wasn't a final score, but a temporary condition. The Mets bought into their own hype. The Mets so wanted their fantasy to become reality. They already had their very own television network. They were building their very own new retro ballpark. They were becoming a brand. They were standing for quality. They had two young stars, a third in his prime, the best starter on the planet and they made it to Game Seven of the 2006 National League Championship Series.

Which they very nearly won.

I swear I believe that's what it always came back to. The nucleus of Wright, Reyes, Beltran and Santana is very sound. Pelfrey should probably be considered a part of that core group now. Delgado earned some consideration in that regard, though it was one stellar half-season on the heels of a season-and-a-half of disappointment. Maine is hurt and Wagner is done. Church hasn't been the same since he was concussed. Daniel Murphy is very young as is Nick Evans and neither has proven a darn thing. Free agent Perez has teetered between Big Game Ollie and a box of rocks. The catchers are mediocre. There is no second baseman to speak of. There is, at most, one reliever — Joe Smith — whose very being doesn't spike Dramamine sales. Endy Chavez is a defensive wonder, but long removed from offensive usefulness. Marlon Anderson's magic as a pinch-hitter was loaded onto the wrong flight. Fernando Tatis was lightning in a bottle...vintage lightning, but who knows from the expiration date?

So let's review. We're talking about a roster with five unquestionable assets for 2009 and a few potentially useful contributors whose upside is heavily dependent on individual development and/or hasty healing. I can't count on Maine for April through September. I can't commit to Perez for however much money he wants. I can't ascertain if Delgado's MVPesque performance is the norm. I can't know what Murphy and Evans can do or where they can play. I can't see Smith branching out beyond specialist territory. And even if every single one of those guys, plus Church, comes through to what we consider his potential, we're talking about no more than half a roster and virtually no bullpen while leaving two serious holes up the middle. We are still short an authentic power bat. We require a legitimate fifth starter and probably a fourth and maybe a third.

All of this is to say October 19, 2006 isn't merely two years in the past now. It's a baseball lifetime ago. It's time for this organization to stop behaving as if the ninth inning of Game Seven of that National League Championship Series is still in progress, that the bases are still loaded and that we are still one swing away from tying this thing up, maybe winning it.

We are not in that position. For all the glitter attached to our network and our ballpark to be and our brand, we are just some team that hangs on only long enough to lose on the final day of the regular season and eliminate ourselves from playoff participation we have little business getting anywhere near. We are not condemned to be that forever, but until the people who run our ballclub accept that the opportunity that sailed into Yadier Molina's mitt on October 19, 2006 was never transferable to the future, we are going to remain eternally one game behind.

I couldn't leave. Eventually I did, but for a few moments, I just could not. I was a runner caught off second — frozen, absolutely frozen. My intention was to turn and exit the Upper Deck, the kind of task I'd accomplished with aplomb who knows how many times on how many levels of where I used to go to baseball games. I couldn't do it. I was physically unable to leave when it was all over. And it was all over.

The game was over.
The season was over.
The race was over.
The ceremony was over.
Shea Stadium (April 17, 1964 – September 28, 2008) was over.

But I couldn't leave behind what I was looking at. I couldn't turn away from it. I knew that when I turned away, it would be gone forever. Only by standing and staring at its field and at its seats and at its memories could I and I alone keep it hooked up to the respirator. Only I could assure it breath. Only I could keep it alive. As long as I stood there, as long as I refused to leave, Shea Stadium could continue to exist.

But I did leave and now it no longer exists. You can still drive by it on the Grand Central, you can still approach it from the Whitestone Expressway, you can still peek out the window on your flight in or out of LaGuardia, and a couple of transit lines will still ferry you past it. 123-01 Roosevelt Avenue is on the map for a little while longer. But it's not there. Maybe here (points to the head), definitely here (points to the heart), but not there where it counts.

It's not a ballpark anymore. A ballpark has ballgames. A ballpark has a ballclub. The club that used to play ball at Shea Stadium doesn't live there anymore. Neither do I. Nor do any of us. Without baseball and without the New York Mets there is — temporary physical evidence notwithstanding — no Shea Stadium.

There is no Shea Stadium.

Contemplate that, would you? Consider the width, breadth and depth of that statement. Shea Stadium was. Not is, but was. Shea Stadium constructs all its sentences for the rest of time in the past tense. Shea Stadium was over there. Shea Stadium was where we went. I used to go to Shea Stadium.

This is a situation unlike any I can fathom. I cannot fathom this situation at all. I saw it end. I heard it end. The gates all but shut in my wake. It's no longer where I go. It's where I went. It's unfathomable.

Shea Stadium's not there. I didn't want to leave it, but it was going no matter what I did.

I won't claim it's an original thought, but as the final outs ticked down today, I mused to myself: It's 2006's Game 7 in miniature.

There was Oliver Perez, a scarily unknown quantity, pitching on three days' rest and acquitting himself very ably indeed. There were the bats, not being heard from enough. There was Endy Chavez, saving the Mets' season with a sparkling defensive play in deep left. There was the much-maligned bullpen, turning Endy's deliverance into a mere stay of execution. And there were the Mets, going home.

It's not a perfect analogy, I know. This time, there was no furious comeback. (Though the game ended not with a called strike three but with a fly ball that looked long off the bat but wound up short, a la Mike Piazza -- or Cody Ross.) But it was close enough. And an easy enough parallel to spot that members of the mainstream media have already offered the same comparison, as many more will tomorrow. Here's a relatively easy prediction: A lot of those writers will pair them only to invoke broken-hearted Met fans, and most of those writers will then offer snarky talk, with blaring headlines, of a second straight collapse.

Not me. Not on either count. Yes, Shea's final game reminded me of her final game in '06. But for a different reason. For a better reason. I remember them together because now as then, my head is held high. My team fought hard and fought honorably, and the only thing I wound up not liking was the outcome. That time, they struggled to make something out of a shotgunned starting rotation, and came up just short. This time, they escaped a choking malaise that had haunted them for a full year, then struggled to overcome a star-crossed bullpen, and came up just short. The finish line was different, but the bravery of the effort was similar.

Am I sad? You better believe it. I'm sad for the players and coaches. (Howard Johnson looked ashen as he took the field for the closing ceremonies.) I'm sad for my blog partner, the biggest Met fan and maybe the kindest man I know. I'm sad for Laurie and Charlie and Joe D. and Sharon and J M and Jeff and Kevin and Coop and Dennis and all our readers and all the rabid fans who cheered their hearts out at Shea and in front of their TVs and studying Gamecast somewhere far away. I'm sad for Emily and Joshua and even little old me, who sat in front of the TV and stood to sing the anthem and "God Bless America" and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" as if we were there, and even broke out the rally caps for the ninth. I'm sad for Shea, which deserved extra days and nights with banners and bunting and ceremonies and cheering and most of all crackling tension under October skies.

But if you'll excuse a familiar turn of phrase, I'm disappointed, not devastated. 2007 was a collapse, no doubt about it. (Though it really started on Memorial Day, with a lot more than 17 to play.) I was livid about it then; I'm still angry about it now. And I will be to my dying day. But 2008 was no collapse, no matter what the scribes say tomorrow. It was a comeback that fell short, and that's a very different thing.

It will be hard, this Met-free October. (Though not so hard that I'm not eager to know what will happen to the crawled-from-their-own-wreckage Brewers, or the scary but psychically burdened Cubs, or the counted-out Twins/White Sox, or the amazin' amazin' Tampa Bay Rays.) It will be hard, this winter of remembering the terror of seeing the bullpen door open, of thinking over and over again about Murphy at third and Wright at bat and none out and the Phillies having lost. It will be hard, figuring out what to do with myself during the vast empty nights of those impossibly bleak five baseball-free months on the calendar.

But I will remember other things too. Like watching Daniel Murphy work counts like Edgardo Alfonzo come back to professional life at a precocious age. Like seeing Mike Pelfrey burst into bloom when we thought he might be yet another prospect who'd wither away in his springtime. Like watching a ball streak toward the gap and knowing that Carlos Beltran, the best center fielder in the game, is already on a smooth course to intercept. Like the billion-watt smile of Carlos Delgado, resurrected and majestic in his baseball second coming. Like Johan Santana, standing against the storm and not only refusing to break but barely even bending.

I'll remember these things, and soon enough the days will be longer, there will be old and new Mets in Florida, and then they'll be here, once again, under warmer and warmer nighttime skies, in a place that's different but that we already know how to get to. And we'll have begun again.

"It’s time to be a MAN.” -- Johan

A long time ago I lived in a group house outside Washington, D.C., and the male housemates had a running joke. The premise was that the world's men had formed a union, and our president was Steve Young, then the never-say-die quarterback of the San Francisco 49'ers. If a male housemate decided you were falling short in the cojones department, he'd inform you (with an audience, of course) that you'd had a phone message (this was before cellphones, because I'm damned old). Steve Young had called, sounding disgusted, barked "GODDAMNIT, BE MORE MANLY!" and hung up. (Yeah yeah, Young was actually a Mormon and so undoubtedly neither swore nor ever had any fun. Shut up.)

After what I witnessed yesterday, though, to heck with Steve Young. Johan Santana is the president of the International Brotherhood of Men, as well as our savior and an ace worth each and every single penny of that $137.5 million.

Greg and I, being insane Met fans, tend to stay put when we're at Shea for a big game. We're organized about our food runs (take care of that before the game, ideally) and even our bathroom trips. (Greg can cover the distance between his seat and the john at cheetah speed; I'm not that fast, but will never go unless the Mets are hitting, since by definition things then can't get worse.) Greg doesn't drink much, and while I can't exactly say the same, I rarely drink more than a token beer in the ballpark for fear of missing things on the field while in the bathroom.

On Saturday neither of us left our seats for nine innings. What was going on down there on the field was way too important to be interrupted for any biological demand. Because what was unfolding below us, in the mist of late September, was nothing less than a passion play with the 2008 Mets' survival at stake.

Normally, fans watch the pitcher. They watch the hitter. And the smart ones watch the outfielders, so they don't roar for pop flies. Today, we and all the other Santana rooters (a wonderful crowd, by the way -- nearly all die-hards in full defiant cry) did all that, but in addition we watched the bullpen door. We were trying to will it to stay shut. No Heilman, no Schoeneweis, no Feliciano, no Stokes, no Smith, no Ayala. All we wanted was Johan, our Rock of Gibraltar against the tides of Marlins and Brewers and Phillies and collapses and ill luck. But how long could he go? He'd been good for 87 pitches on short rest once upon a time, but that was a while back. He'd just thrown his career high. How long could that dreaded bullpen door stay shut?

We fretted after the bottom of the sixth, when Johan got the Marlins 1-2-3, then cheered rapturously when he strode to the plate as the second batter in the seventh. We roared and chanted his name as he got through Paul Lo Duca, the deadly Hanley Ramirez and John Baker in the eighth. In the ninth, we were on our feet for every pitch, baying his name, trying to shove him across the finish line. With two out and a runner on second, Cody Ross lifted a potentially dangerous-looking ball to deep left. Some around us groaned. I just stared, my mouth hanging open, the parts of my brain used for calculating trajectories and estimating arcs temporarily shorted out. "IT'S IN THE GLOVE!" Greg yelled, and sure enough, the ball came down cradled in Endy Chavez's eminently trustworthy hands. Game over, a three-hit shutout on three days' rest. Unbelievable.

Greg has a ticket for today; I do not. This is significant, because in recent years I've developed a curious habit: When I know it might be my last visit to Shea for the year, I give myself over to all the silly between-innings stuff. I cheer for the Kiss Cam and the Delta Dental Smile of the Game. I stand up and hope the Pepsi Party Patrol finds me with a shirt. I let Diamondvision and Busta Rhymes tell me when to clap and what to yell. Yesterday, I was too terrified to follow potential-last-game protocol for a while. But then I remembered. And so I sang lustily along to "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." I clapped for "Lazy Mary." (Jesus, do I hate that song.) And in the eighth, I was in full cry for "I'm a Believer." Halfway through, I realized a slight pronoun switch would make it the perfect song for the day, the season, the pitcher and what was at stake out there in the rain:

I thought love was more or less a given thing,
Seems the more I gave the less I got.
Whats the use in tryin'?
All you get is pain.
When I needed sunshine I got rain.

Then I saw [his] face, now I'm a believer
Not a trace of doubt in my mind.

And before I knew it I was wiping my eyes with the back of my hands. Jesus fucking Christ, I thought, I'm misty-eyed about the fucking Monkees. Somebody get Steve Young on the phone.

If Greg noticed, he was politic enough not to say anything. What got to me? Well, everything: The sheer audacious bravery of the man on the mound, throwing a team and a terrified fan base on his back and demanding they measure up to what he was accomplishing; the dull pain and wild hope of seeing an undermanned, overachieving team trying to cheat the hangman; the memory of 2007 and how everything turned to ashes before our eyes; and the thought that if Johan could do this, if these Mets could back him up, then whatever happened on Sunday Shea would have a marvelous memory to offer so close to her end.

I am not sentimental about Shea -- quite the contrary, in fact, though that's not something to discuss right now. But looking out over Shea's familiar bowl in the late innings yesterday, I found myself thanking the baseball gods for making the old park once more a showcase for what human beings of extraordinary ability and supernatural will can do with a ball and bat and some gloves. Baseball is our most beautiful game and, to my eyes, one of our highest artistic achievements. On Saturday, at Shea Stadium, it was played about as beautifully, thrillingly and heart-stoppingly as it can be. Nothing that happens today, whether it brings us joy or misery as Met fans, will erase that.

On the way out, as Greg has already told you, he and I quietly debated where Santana's day ranked with great Met clutch pitching performances. Al Leiter in the play-in game? Superb, and our backs were against the wall, but he wasn't on three days' rest. John Maine a year ago in this same Game 161? Terrific, but he did have a heck of a cushion. Sid Fernandez in Game 7? Heroic, but a relief stint. Maine in Game 6 against the Cardinals? Fantastic, but he went 5 1/3. Oliver Perez a night later? Wonderful, wholly unexpected, and on three days' rest, but he went six and we lost. Jerry Koosman in Game 2 of the '69 Series? Great, and stopped the bleeding from Game 1, but not back-to-the-wall stuff. Bobby Jones dismantling the Giants? Marvelous, and we didn't want to go back to San Francisco, but we had some wiggle room.

Santana, we decided tentatively, might just stand alone. And then we quietly considered that as we went down the ramp, out into the mist of a season that has at least one more meaningful day after all.

As we went from the upper deck to the mezzanine to the loge and to field level, I let my eyes linger on the familiar ramps and blue girders and Mr. Met signs and scary-looking puddles and stopped escalators and stalled food carts and boozy, happy fans, knowing this might well be the last time I saw them in such familiar surroundings. And at ground level, at the gate, I let my hand rest on Shea's tan bricks for a long moment, ignoring the grumbles from the sudden pile-up I'd caused behind me.

"Thanks, old girl," I said quietly. "I hope I see you again."

O, Death
O, Death
Won't you spare me over 'til another year?
—Ralph Stanley

O, Mets. That's all I keep saying to myself this week. O, Mets. I won't know what it means 'til after Sunday's game. Maybe later.

Maybe much later.

It is not out of the question that Johan Santana's mastery of the Marlins goes down as every bit the footnote to 2008 as John Maine's one-hitter versus Florida at the very same juncture of last year did to 2007. We all remember the Maine. We just don't think about it much given what followed. You know you'll never see that one reair as a Mets Classic.

We shouldn't forget the Santana. I doubt we will. It was brilliant, it was stunning, it was both a total surprise and wholly expected. Its impact on this season and this franchise could be profound.

Or it could be a footnote. We don't know.

But we do know what an ace looks like. We do know what A Man pitches like. Forgive the over-the-top jockishness of this assessment, but that was A Man out there Saturday. Easy enough to call him The Man (or Johan The Man...I'm sure Stan Musial wouldn't mind sharing). But wow, the way he walks up to Jerry Manuel, says "I'm pitching" and then pitches the way he did, the way we needed, the way nobody does anymore, the way hardly anybody here ever has in a situation of this magnitude. What A Man, What A Man, What A Mighty Good Man.

Mind you, I just assume he pitched well. I was there and I had a nice home plateish view from the Upper Deck, but after taking note of his literal and figurative broad shoulders, I didn't watch Johan Santana pitch the game of my life all that much. I was watching other pitchers. I had my eyes fixed on the right field bullpen.

Nobody's getting up, are they?
That one...he's just taking off his jacket 'cause it's muggy...right?
The bullpen door is shut, isn't it? Gosh, can't we get some superglue and maybe a Doberman to make sure?

That, to co-opt a line a friend uses from a Broadway show to describe another player, is why we have a Johan Santana: so we can forget we have the Mets' bullpen.

No worries. Johan had a little trouble in the fifth, putting runners on second and third and wisely walking with the best intentions Hanley Ramirez. His pitch count was over 70, of concern given the three days' rest. We needed him to get out of that one. John Baker's sinking liner gave me a sinking feeling, but Ryan Church kept Johan's ledger clean. After that there was no looking back...just looking over the right field fence. Hey Schoeneweis, that better be a seventh-inning stretch you're taking there!

Johan Santana was flawless. Fifty-two weeks to the very day John Maine flirted with a no-hitter, Johan Santana was perfect. The line score may say different, but 54,920 of us (minus the rainophobes) knew it for certain. It wasn't so much that the Florida Marlins couldn't touch Johan Santana. It was that they couldn't beat him.

No way. No how. No defeat.

No coming out for Johan. Johan was a throwback Saturday. Johan on three days' rest is better than God creating the world in six days. God made mistakes. God created Met middle relievers.

Have we ever won a 2-0 blowout? Ricky Nolasco was pretty formidable himself (10 K's in 7 IP, one more than Johan accumulated in going the distance) but I barely noticed we weren't hitting. Ramon Martinez and the Mets offense did just enough. David Wright and the Mets defense nabbed as necessary. Otherwise it was a matter of watching an immortal dropping by and being a good enough sport to play a little sandlot with some neighborhood kids. The other Mets and all the Marlins should have lined up single-file to get his autograph after the game.

Jason's first words to me following the 27th out were "Where does this one rank?" Well, I thought, somewhere between the Second Coming and simultaneous heart-brain surgery, but he meant it in terms of clutch Mets pitching performances through the years. We bandied about some impressive examples, including Maine's from September '07, but I maintain it's a mostly pointless exercise. Nothing compares to Johan Santana demanding the ball on three days' rest in an age when nobody pitches on three days' rest and then throwing a shutout on the second-to-last day of the year when the Mets are a game behind the afternoon after one of the most dispiriting nights this team and this fan have ever known.

I'm not saying it's the best-pitched game the Mets have ever had. The Mets have had some pretty good pitchers and quite a few well-pitched games. I'm saying that when you toss into the bowl all the surrounding circumstances and you stir it with a Johan Santana three-hit shutout on three days' rest, you've never seen a cake like that rise in the Mets' oven.

Never.

With the very first pitch Johan Santana threw Saturday, my jangling nerves from Friday night snapped back into place. My whole M.O. about sorta, kinda hoping the Mets would go quietly and clear out for the Shea Goodbye festivities dissipated into the steady mist. All it took was one pitch and I was on board, even if I had no idea how badly the ride might crash into the finale Sunday.

Closure can wait. Give me continuation. I'll worry about reflecting on the distant past after Game 162. Game 161 made the lingering present a whole lot brighter.

How badly was this game needed? Beyond one out with two to play needing to become two-way tie with one to play? Well, I'd like to think the Mets couldn't sink any lower than they did Friday. I'd like to think I touched bottom early Saturday. While the rain has largely stayed away, the black cloud over my head opened wide before the game. I was standing my post in Section 22, chatting with Charlie Hangley as has become a most pleasant Saturday tradition these last two years. The game was nowhere near starting and the walkway was nowhere near crowded. Charlie was in Row A, so I could lean up against his railing and step aside with ease whenever somebody needed the adjacent steps.

An usher comes by. He speaks courteously but there's that presumptuous Shea employee tinge to it that sets me off. Sir, you have to move, he says.

It wasn't an unreasonable request, but at that moment I was that punk kid in the movies who'd been hearing people telling him to "move along" all his life and all it took was one cross word to push him over the edge and into pulling his switchblade.

"Sir, you have to move."

Normally, I move. Normally, I say excuse me and scoot out of the way. Normally, I am very spatially aware of other people's needs.

But not after Friday night. Not after the two September homestands. Not after a season's worth of idiocy from the Shea Stadium workforce. Not after these 36 years.

"Sir you have to move."

A pause. Then I strike.

"YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!"

Again, there's not that much pedestrian foot traffic. And I'm talking to my friend Charlie on his last trip to Shea, where I've always talked to Charlie and my presence has never been a problem.

I'm frozen for half a second. Charlie is motioning me to an empty seat next to him. I take one step but I steam instead. And I turn back to the usher who is between tips.

"YOU'VE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME!"

"Hey," he smiles. "You can't stand there. People have to get through."

I can't stress enough that what he said was true and that I wasn't about to be put out by complying. But I've been hearing people at Shea telling me to move along all my life. My last sight of the Mets was from the night before, them letting me down, them forcing me to wish them into the corn field. I was still the Bubba Burger Angry Fan of the Game.

I blurted out an "I'll see you later" to Charlie and stomped off to my seat in Section 6. And I calmed the fuck down. (When I mentioned to Jason that I don't roll with the punches very well and thus tend to lash out at the strangest times and the strangest targets, he was very quick to agree, which makes me wonder what else I've done to who at Shea.)

Johan lifted the cloud. Johan and, irony of ironies, Peter Finch. For years, the A/V squad played the famous "I'm mad as hell" clip from Network, using it to elicit a tremendous LET'S GO METS! chant from the crowd. I thought it was one of the most clever things they ever did. Then sometime last year, it disappeared. Instead we got that atonal Kevin James blowing the cadence and Darryl Strawberry doing community service and Chris Rock not sure if the camera is on and whoever wandered by on any given day having no idea what Let's Go Mets means to us. I didn't want them telling me to yell Let's Go Mets. I wanted Howard Beale from UBS.

Before Saturday's game, I got him. When Finch/Beale commanded, "I want you to get up now..." I actually got up. The game hadn't started yet, but I got out of my chair and went to my window, opened it, stuck my head out and yelled...

LET'S GO METS!

Felt very good. Just like seeing the quintessential No. 2 starter Jerry Koosman reveal No. 2. Like seeing the securer of the last out of the first championship Cleon Jones throw out the first ball instead of, say, State Farm Insurance Agent of the Day Pat Cawley of Glendale, New York (I swear, I've seen his picture on DiamondVision so much I'm tempted to take out a policy on my mind). Like being part of the crowd that was at least 135 degrees more intense and a thousand percent less boo-some than Friday's. Like hearing not just all of "Takin' Care Of Business" by BTO but a little "Keep The Faith" from Bon Jovi. I don't really like Bon Jovi, but I sure as hell like any excuse to invoke faith instead of fear at Shea Stadium.

But all that amazin', amazin', amazin' karma aside, I don't know if it's a one-day wonder or the start of something big. I thought Maine might change the culture on the final Saturday last year, but his older, more accomplished rotationmate invalidated that theory in the very first inning Sunday. This is still the same team as it was Friday, except Johan Santana pitched. It will be the same team Sunday, except Oliver Perez will pitch. If there's two things we know about Ollie Perez, it's that he comes up huge when we absolutely need him and he has less than nothing when we absolutely need him. Ollie is two pitchers, but sadly only one can be used and we don't know which will show up.

But, y'know, that's the love rollercoaster we're on. Monday, Wednesday and Friday I was never lower. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday I was never higher. I don't particularly care for that pattern, but no one said it was set in granite. If you're looking for a rallying cry, that's about the best I have: we might not lose.

One night when I was in college, I was wearing my satin Starter Mets jacket and a guy came up to me. He was a Mets fan, too. That very day a bunch of '69 Mets and a bunch of '69 Cubs had convened in St. Petersburg to play an Old Timers game. He was there and it was great, he said. I wanted to be there, I said, but couldn't make it.

"You didn't go? You're not a real fan!"

That's the last time another Mets fan questioned my credentials (and that college student grew up to be Steve Phillips...no, not really). I think I'm pretty well set up in that regard since, but after Friday I wasn't sure if I was a real fan. A real fan wants his team to hang in there as long as it can until it makes the playoffs or until it dies trying. I just wanted out. Now I don't. I feel more like a real fan again.

Which doesn't make me wildly optimistic (even if I'm not resolutely pessimistic). I think back to a conversation I had with my mother when I was seven. It was the afternoon before the Knicks would play the Lakers in the deciding game of the NBA finals. I fretted my head off that my Knicks, who had been the best team in the league all year, might actually not win the championship. Well, my mother cautioned, if the Lakers win instead, it will be because they deserve it.

Willis Reed limped onto the court and the Knicks won, but it's my mother's unusual words of wisdom that mean more to me now. If the Mets win, then there's nothing to do but jump up and down for a few minutes before we start dreading the Cubs again. If the Mets lose, then they probably didn't deserve the Wild Card as much as the Brewers. Neither contender deserves a playoff spot if you ask me, but they're both right there and it's in their hands, not mine.

It's the final game we know of at Shea Stadium on Sunday. I still look forward to all that implies. I no longer dread the 2008 Mets' impact on the farewell ceremonies, on the nostalgic bent of the afternoon, of my memories and my emotions. It even occurred to me that the day could be embellished by what they (and the Cubs) do. I don't know how it will unfold, but I don't fear it.

You know you've got to keep the faith.

I love the Mets because I love the Mets.

I don't love the Mets because they are such a well-run organization filled with the kind of people whose baseball acumen translates to a satisfying sense of your fate being in good hands. Only the Pirates and their sixteen consecutive losing seasons sit between the Mets and rock bottom in terms of reasonable return on resources.

I don't love the Mets because they treat their customers with care and respect. I've been to the past fourteen home games and I know they approach us with unsurpassed indifference as they hold us in utter contempt. Friday night they looked at us and saw, at best, 49,545 walking cash machines or, at worst, the reason they couldn't go home early.

I don't love the Mets because of the great mass of Mets fans. Too many Mets fans come to Mets games for reasons that apparently have nothing to do with supporting the Mets. These are the kinds of people who stand in your way in supermarket aisles and cut you off on the Southern State and boo their cats for not being dogs.

I don't love the Mets because of the players who are currently on the Mets. The players on the Mets, individually and as a unit, haven't forged an instinctual connection with me. I have nothing against them but I find myself with little in particular for them. Some are talented and seem good-natured and I appreciate their efforts on my nominal behalf. Mostly, though, I don't feel this bunch all that much. And, though it's not a jailing crime, they're just not very good.

I don't love the Mets because they are replacing Shea Stadium with World Class Citi Field. I don't like that at all, actually. I don't like that by selling off every last piece of Shea they are demonstrating their intent to blot out as much Mets history as possible so one man can indulge a personal nostalgia for a team very few of us ever saw. Mets ownership wants us to believe the last 47 years have been no more than an asterisk between Brooklyn Dodger dynasties real and imagined.

I love the Mets because I love the Mets.

That's what it comes down to on the morning of the second-to-last game of this season, the second-to-last game ever at Shea Stadium, the cloudy preamble to a murky finale. My overexposure to the Mets in September 2008 has left me with only my love as a reason for my love. It is circular reasoning whose perimeter permits no logic to permeate. I love the Mets because I love the Mets even though there is almost nothing on the surface about the Mets that I can stand anymore.

But I do love the Mets. Which is why, in my heart, I am rooting for the end today.

I don't know how to accomplish it in a dignified fashion. It was going to be easier when the scheduled starting pitcher was Undecided. I have no attachment to a rainy-day parade of middle relievers and overmatched youngsters. Let them go out and suck it up, let it be some Gl@v!nesque score before too long, let it be over with and then let whoever our enemy in the standings is this weekend go out and put us out of our misery. Then let me come back to Shea Stadium on Sunday free and clear of competitive implications — nobody riled up — and let me enjoy one final game in something resembling the sun. Give me my moments of contemplation and emotion and give me my procession of players I did feel and let me enjoy my time with those folks like me who came to love the Mets because they, like me, love the Mets.

Then Jerry Manuel announced Johan Santana would start on short rest today. And I can't root against that. I couldn't root against Jonathon Niese or Brandon Knight either, of course, but I could kind of ease out the door and not hold myself responsible. Niese? Knight? We're not serious about winning anyway. But Johan on three days' rest, whether or not it works, is an indication that somebody with a hand on the wheel actually cares about how they finish. Al Leiter went on three days' rest in Game Six in Atlanta and was predictably clobbered. Johan Santana is about three times the pitcher Leiter ever was (that's not a knock on Al, it's just a fact), but pitchers don't go on three days' rest and haven't for more than thirty years.

Johan Santana has done everything you could want from him and the Mets are sitting on the edge of extinction on the penultimate day of the season with 88 wins. That's one more win than they had 52 weeks ago this morning when they were sitting on the edge of extinction. That's the Mets for you: bring in the best pitcher in baseball and improve exactly one iota. Johan proved his worth and his grit the other night against the Cubs. If he can't produce his high-end magic on command, I won't hold it against him.

I don't hold anything against these guys. They're not that good is all. There are like five players who are and everybody else is a stopgap. How can anybody get mad at the Mets for being no better than they really are? The one movie for which I drop everything whenever it's on is Rudy. Rudy's dream is to make the football team at Notre Dame and nothing — certainly not his lack of football skill — is going to stop him. His spiteful older brother Frank, however, is not impressed by his quest or his progress.

"If you are on that team," Frank tells Rudy, "my opinion of Notre Dame just hit the shits."

That's how I see the National League in 2008. The Mets are in a position to potentially make the playoffs? These Mets? The Mets of Brian Stokes and Luis Ayala and Bobby Parnell and Ramon Martinez and Robinson Cancel and wave upon wave of underdeveloped kid and overtraveled retread? The same Mets who committed a small GDP to Johan Santana yet have gotten by otherwise on Dollar Tree bargains and almost made it? That is worthy of admiration if you squint, but not worthy of being taken seriously.

How do people boo these guys? How do you get mad at a team that isn't that good for performing to reputation? How do you get down on Aaron Heilman for being Aaron Heilman, Pedro Feliciano for being Pedro Feliciano, everybody for being everybody? I used to lament that nobody stuck around much on this roster, that you never got to know Mets before they became something else. Now we've got a few guys who have been Mets a pretty long time, like Heilman, like Feliciano, and they are treated not as old hands trying their best but as vermin for whom you'd better call Arrow Exterminating. I won't pretend either Heilman or Feliciano has his picture tacked above my figurative headboard; they're not my favorites or anything. But geez! Heilman pitching with whatever injuries he's been harboring can't quite get the last out of an inning and you can't say "thanks anyway"?

It was reported in the darkest days of the mostly dark days of the New Jersey Nets franchise that they pumped crowd noise into the Meadowlands to make it sound fuller and more encouraging. I swear we have the opposite at Shea now. Somebody presses a button and I hear boos. It's automatic, a misanthropic mangling of the electronic cheerleading: EVERYBODY CLEAR YOUR THROAT! (BooBooBooBoo Boo Boo Boo!)

I sat in front of somebody booing on Friday night. Booed Parnell. Booed Feliciano. Booed Heilman. It wasn't drunken booing and it wasn't exhibitionistic booing. It was simple disappointment-driven booing, the frustration of watching a so-called playoff contender crumble before the mighty Florida Marlins. His girlfriend tried to talk him down, but he was just mad and sullen. He didn't know how else to respond. He just thought this is what you do when things don't go your way.

I still don't get it. It wasn't my biggest priority last night to analyze him and his 10,000 like-minded cohorts, but I don't get it. The Mets won't play any better because you boo. Shea won't feel any less tense because you boo. Your memory of the third-to-last game ever in this building won't be enhanced because you booed. All you'll have is a sore throat.

One of the Kozy Shack-sponsored video vignettes shown in the half-hearted DiamondVision salute to Shea history focused on the '73 Mets, a squad described as "injury-plagued and underachieving". When, I asked my very good friend Jim Haines on the occasion of our final Shea Stadium game together, have the Mets not been injury-plagued and underachieving? Injury-plagued and underachieving could characterize the '74 Mets and the '75 Mets and the '76 Mets...right up to the '08 Mets. They are injured. They haven't achieved what's been in reach, their Quadruple-A underpinnings notwithstanding. But this is what they do and who they are. That is why we so often hold in highest esteem the rare edition of this club that exceeds expectations. I dwell fondly on the summer of 1980 and the heart of the 1997 season even if they lacked the happy ending of 1969 because it was so unlike the Mets to overcome expectations. Usually they simply don't live up to them. If this was news to you as of September 26, 2008, you haven't been paying attention and maybe you shouldn't have bought a ticket.

I hate the booing, but I can live with it most weekends. Not this one. I didn't buy my way in to every game this weekend and make sure I was at every home game this month to hear you boo, to have you cast more of a pall than even a lousy bullpen could on my final hours in the only ballpark I will ever truly consider mine. It's bad enough that the Mets can't win enough games to extend this season into a postseason. It's bad enough that the Mets train their employees at the Rikers Island Customer Service Academy. It's bad enough that a request for "only or mostly onions if you can please" on my final ever Premio Italian Sausage was met with bafflement and a heap of peppers. It's bad enough that for every promotion, the first 25,000 get the item and the next 25,000 get the finger, unless it's Foam Finger Day. It's bad enough the scoreboard posted three separate announcements urging you to call a Vandalism Hotline and rat out anybody you see trying to make off with the napkin dispensers before they can be auctioned for insane profit. It's bad enough that the pennant the Mets gave away at the door would receive a C+ in most arts & crafts classes (which is strange considering the Mets are generally expert at giving away pennants). It's bad enough that the whole Greatest Moments presentation, like the whole Countdown debacle, was underwhelming and apathetically handled. Everything with the Mets gives you no reliable rationale to love them but you do anyway.

What I am left with is the ideal of the Mets, loving the Mets for the sake of loving the Mets. Loving the Mets because I always have and Shea Stadium has always been my destination and all I've ever wanted to do was go there and sit there and be with my friends — like Laurie Thursday night, like Jim last night, like Jason this afternoon weather permitting — who love the Mets for the same nonlinear reasons I do. Poor Jim. Jim blames himself for the Mets losing whenever he goes. They lose almost always when he goes. The Mets are 2-11 in our last thirteen games together. Every afternoon before every night game I've attended with Jim I am filled with anticipation for how much I am going to love sitting with him and deconstructing the Mets and life. Since August 18, 2005, the Mets are 0-10 in night games we've attended together. I had nine instances of precedent to prepare me for the loss last night and I looked forward to our going just as much as I had those other nine times. He implicitly blamed himself for Friday's loss — himself and Daniel Murphy for not being taller and more agile. Yet I've never regretted a moment we've been together in those seats.

For all the kvetching and moaning I've done since taking the September plunge, I haven't regretted any of it because I've gotten to sit next to people for whom my affection is almost boundless. They more than Santana and Wright and Reyes and the reliever of the minute club and the idiots who block off escalators and can't prepare a pretzel...they have come to represent the Mets for me. They represent Shea Stadium to me. The walkoff hits in the rain are sublime, but the nine innings that precede them are made whole by those on my left or right. They've given me a month I will hold dear from now to doomsday. For them and people like them — the people who endure 6-1 defeats that send a season to the brink and then step outside and take pictures because they'll never see Shea again — I wish the Mets would win today and win tomorrow and for the Brewers to lose to the Cubs twice and for us to go on. Surely I'd like a shot at a championship. Surely our collective psyche would be boosted should the Mets live up to that sign I saw held in the Field Boxes Thursday after Beltran scored Reyes:

NY PLAYOFF BASEBALL — ONLY IN QUEENS!

Not so deep down, though, I kind of wish the Mets and all their nonsense would just go away. It's a baseball season curdling at the edges now. It's the end of September. I don't want winter to start the night of September 28, but maybe it must. Maybe this season should stop screwing with us already. At bare minimum this season's fortunes must be straightened out by Sunday afternoon. It must not be left to the wolves baying at its failures at that moment the Mets of my youth and the Mets of my relatively recent maturity come marching out of whatever tunnel they will be kept. I've been waiting since April for this Shea Goodbye ritual. I don't need to buy two seats for $869. I don't need to join the Premiere Club for $25,000. I don't need to run to the New Era stand so I can purchase my Official Final Weekend cap for whatever they're charging (bloodsuckers). I need the postgame ceremony, however. I need it and want it. I want the Mets to admit they do have a history of which they are proud. I want to breathe in 1964 and 1969 and everything thereafter. I want to see, one more time, the Mets who gave me and my friends something to talk about. I want the Mets being the Mets before they are remarketed as latter-day Dodgers in faux Ebbets Field.

I've been on hand for, I suppose, tens of thousands of Mets fans' final visits to Shea this season. I've watched the pictures get taken and I've heard the buzz. "This is my last game at Shea...wow. I can't believe I won't be here again. Bye Shea!" Those people had their day. Now I want mine. I want it free and clear. I don't want the shortsighted sniping that the Mets fucking did it to us again in the last game, how could they do this to me? — BOOOOOO!!!!!! to ruin it. I don't want a torrent of grumbling from the types who don't pay attention to anything that isn't instant gratification to drown out the footsteps of 45 years. I want those people to leave in the seventh inning. If Shea Stadium has no more than me and my wife and the souls who share our values, even if there aren't 56,000 of us by then, fine. We will make the right kind of noise for Mr. Seaver and Mr. Piazza and Mr. Strawberry and whoever else shows up. We will make it a salute to ourselves and our love for love's sake and those with whom we've shared it. I don't need the slim prospect of a Wild Card play-in game for that.

When I was sick a couple of weeks ago and I dragged myself to Shea on the Friday night when it rained and for the Saturday doubleheader and the Sunday afternoon game, do you know what my biggest anxiety was? It wasn't that I would make myself sicker. It was that I wouldn't be able to cheer properly. It was that when it came time to yell LET'S GO METS! that I couldn't because my throat hurt too much and I was coughing a lot. I went anyway and I yelled anyway. I got rained out, lost two out of three and was sold no pretzel for my troubles, but I yelled. I cheered. I went. I regretted only what was unavoidably regrettable. The rest I was all in for and that's fine. That's what I do.

For my own sake, for the team I love, for the team I've loved forever, for the team that ran us through the gamut two Octobers ago and again last September with heartbreak our only reward in both instances and for the place I will eternally inhabit even as its appointment with demolition draws nigh, I really wouldn't mind if the Mets would get it over with and lose today. I really wouldn't mind if then the Cubs — the first team I ever rooted against and is now supposed to be my temporary savior — lost. If all unlikely prospects of continuation of 2008 were to be definitively statistically eliminated, I could come to Shea Stadium Sunday and have one last beautiful, angst-free day. I would have no shot at a championship, but I'd have peace of mind where the Mets are concerned.

That's way too much to ask for. Let's Go Mets.

The rain stayed away. It might have been better if it had come.

If it were May or June, this would be one of those drab, no-show games that you immediately toss down the memory hole. Being late September, it was like having cinder block after cinder block piled on top of you. Chris Volstad keeps going 2-1 and 3-1 and the Mets keep letting him escape. Oof! Third time through the lineup and now Volstad can get that curveball over. Ugh! Mike Pelfrey arguably had Josh Willingham struck out, Bruce Dreckman didn't call it and now Willingham has banged one off the orange plywood-and-chicken-wire foul-pole extension that amused me when I was reading Paul Lukas's take on it but now makes me want to cry. Ouch! Oh goodie, the bullpen is here for its usual slow-motion car wreck. Pedro Feliciano is hitting guys and Aaron Heilman is walking them. Gasp! And now Hanley Ramirez is on the warpath again. Jesus, Hanley, I've always thought you were a great player, so cut it out. Auggh! And now we have too far to go. [Death rattle]

So, one game behind Milwaukee with two to go. Johan Santana will pitch one of them, but which one? It's like some psychotic variation of the Lady or the Tiger: If you get the Lady you have to immediately pick from another set of doors, only this time there are many more of them, lots of Tigers and possibly no Lady behind any of them. But if you get the Tiger the first time, the Lady's appearance doesn't matter. Hell, that doesn't make any sense, but what does in a world where we don't convert a runner on third and nobody out one night, then get a miracle from Ramon Martinez and Robinson Cancel the next? If Jon Niese or Brandon Knight starts tomorrow and loses, the season is quite possibly over and everyone will wail and gnash forevermore about how we needed to pitch Santana. If Santana pitches and wins tomorrow, the season comes down to Niese or Knight, with Johan watching helplessly from behind the dugout railing. If Santana goes tomorrow and loses on three days' rest, a lot of stupid people will say a lot of stupid things about him. And no matter what, we need help from a Cub team that has its feet up.

I know, I know, Santana has to go tomorrow. But there's a military acronym for this situation -- AOS. It stands for All Options Suck. And it's decisions like this that make me glad that while I'm an insane fan, I'm not a manager.

The worst thing of all? It's that I can feel myself sliding beyond this next logical stage of grief and working my way toward acceptance. No bullpen, half of a starting rotation, no natural left fielder, a concussed right fielder, no second baseman, a carousel of beat-up and suspect catchers -- there's no possible shame in falling short with that, and no collapse involved. It's a goddamn miracle the team got this far, seeing where they were in mid-June. I know nothing is decided, and I'll be out there cheering my guts out for a team that's spent the year surprising me in ways both good and bad, and praying that somehow old Shea gets a stay of execution. But the hangman is here, and defiance feels very hard to muster.

Welcome to Flashback Friday: Tales From The Log, a final-season tribute to Shea Stadium as viewed primarily through the prism of what I have seen there for myself, namely 399 regular-season and 13 postseason games to date. The Log records the numbers. The Tales tell the stories...including this one, which appeared as part of an earlier Flashback, but felt appropriate to excerpt today. It was the first time I went to the last scheduled game of a Shea Stadium season.

10/6/85 Su Montreal 1-2 Latham 1 14-24 L 2-1
Joel and I, getting better at planning, had bought tickets in advance for the final Sunday. This, we figured, could be even bigger than the Gooden-Tudor matchup we missed out on. This could settle the division.

Of course it didn't, but it was something else.

It was chilly. It was, after all, October 6. But it was warm, too. We were playing the Expos. Hubie Brooks, the third baseman we traded to get Gary Carter ten months earlier, was Montreal's shortstop. He had 99 RBI. When he got his hundredth against us, making him the first shortstop since Ernie Banks in the late '50s to do so, we all gave him a big ovation.

The Expos took a lead, but so what? We were seeing a pretty obvious B-team. Gooden would've started on short rest had it mattered, but it didn't. So we got Bill Latham. It was his last game as a Met. Time would reveal that it was also the last Met appearance for the likes of Bowa, Gardenhire, Tom Paciorek, John Christensen, Ronn Reynolds and an outfielder named Billy Beane. It was the first for Randy Myers. And with two out in the ninth and the Mets down a run, Davey Johnson sent up, as a pinch-hitter, Daniel Joseph Staub, Rusty. Rusty was a hero in the field on my Graduation Day. We knew this was it for him. He said so. It was his 23rd season. His first was 1963, the first season I was alive for. Ten years after that, he played in the last World Series at Shea Stadium.

Rusty hit a sharp grounder to second. The ball was too sharp. The batter was too slow. A long career and an eternal season ended with a one-run loss.

The Mets finished 98-64, three games behind the Cardinals. That should've been that, but 1985 was too good to let go of so quickly.

Our attention was directed to DiamondVision where a highlight montage set to Frank Sinatra's "Here's to the Winners" unspooled. The whole season literally flashed before our eyes. We couldn't help but applaud the immensity and the texture of the thing. Blue and orange balloons went up into the Queens sky. The 1985 Mets — Doc, Darryl, Mex, Kid, Wally, Lenny, Mookie, Roger, Jesse, Rusty...the whole bunch of 'em — stepped out of the dugout and on to the field to wave once more. It was a group curtain call demanded for finishing a close second.

Then they threw their caps to the fans in the nearby field box seats.

Now we could go home.

Note: The final Tale From The Log will appear on the Friday following the final-ever game at Shea Stadium, whenever that should happen to be.

My back to the wall, a victim of laughing chance
This is for me the essence of true romance
Sharing the things we know and love with those of my kind
Libations, sensations that stagger the mind
—Steely Dan

I've crossed that fine line from theoretical home stretch to the beginning of the end of the line. This is no longer a drill. This is no longer me thinking about what it will be like at the end of Shea Stadium. This one's for real, I already bought the dream. I can stop having little fits of emotion late at night and during the day and on the train listening to the wrong song on my iPod. I can quit wondering whether I am going to miss Shea as much as I say I will or if I'm just saying that because I think I should miss Shea that much.

It's too late for all that. It's hitting me hourly. And in the middle of it all, these Mets and their games. They're still playing. They're still alive. Oh, they're alive all right.

And there I am in the middle of it like I've never been before, an ornament, I'd like to think, to the pennant race, certainly a face in the crowd...every crowd, every night.

Even in the wind. Even in the rain. Even after Wednesday. Even down 6-3 in the seventh one pitch after Pedro Martinez has theatrically saluted us for saluting him, one uncomfortable beat after Ricardo Rincon has been nailed to a cross constructed of forMicah.

When Thursday night's game ended in absolute, overwhelming Met triumph. Laurie and I feverishly exchanged high-fives with the two guys directly behind us. Big deal, you're thinking, everybody does that when their team wins. Yes, but two innings earlier, I suspected there was going to be genuine violence between at least two of us four: Laurie and the guy who placed a little too much ignorant emphasis on Ricardo Rincon's Mexican heritage as he expressed frustration over Micah Hoffpauir's seemingly spine-crushing three-run homer. A little tense back-and-forth ensued, the guy saying he's entitled to express his opinion over his team any way he wants (while addressing Laurie as "ma'am") and Laurie respectfully suggesting if he really hates his team as his steady and loud running diatribe implied, he ought to be doing something else. Despite the guy's friend insisting "we're all in this together," it was truly bordering on the unpleasant when I threw in my two cents that let's calm down, this stadium's only got four more days, relax and enjoy it.

"Hey," one of them said. "It's got more than four days!"

"That's the spirit," I said, rather half-heartedly and a little sarcastically. It was 6-3, Pedro Martinez's Mets career was over, it was windy, it was raining, it wasn't 24 hours removed from the night before and it didn't seem the time for false hustle. But I was for anything that would keep the peace.

Who knew that sometimes the idiots sitting behind you know what they're talking about?

It was my last night in Mezzanine and my last game with Laurie, a cult figure among longstanding FAFIF readers for the way she leads with her heart and throws emotional elbows. I assure you it's not intentional on her part. She just doesn't understand how a person can support a team by telling its components how worthless they are. Nothing gets Laurie down like the fans who seem to come to Shea to boo the Mets. From the wrong angle, it sounds like she's harping. When you've shared as many Shea armrests over as many Shea seasons as I have with Laurie, you know it's her own strain of unconditional Met love. Some people who know her only from her comments here ask me "what's Laurie like?" I can truthfully respond, à la Choo Choo Coleman, Laurie likes the Mets, bub.

Likes them a lot, like I do. But neither of us is so blinded by our passion that we thought we were looking at anything but a drenching and a beating Thursday.

We determined early in the evening that the Mets were screwed, that every time Wright or Church did anything positive at bat we'd be driven to think "where was that last night?" We decided "last night" — Wednesday when Daniel Murphy was glued to third by three insidiously sticky unproductive outs — would become That Night in Metspeak, that in 2010 or 2015 or whenever a leadoff runner stood in serious scoring position and the heart of the lineup failed to lift as much as a sac fly, we'd instinctively say "it's just like That Night against the Cubs." That Night would join the pantheon of pitiful patois: Pendleton, bases-loaded walk, devastated. That Night would require no explanation for anyone who lived through it.

That Night is now maybe nothing more than the night before whatever we wind up calling this one. Maybe it's when this night combines with That Night and they became Those Nights against the Cubs in late September 2008, the nights when first we were dead but then we weren't.

Then again, something else could take hold.

The Comeback Game?
The Best Rain Game Since Ventura?
The Last Pedro Game?
The Dreaded Micah Hoffpauir Game?
The Ryan Church Slide Game?
The Robinson Cancel/Ramon Martinez Game?
The Beltran Walkoff Single Game?
The game that set the stage for Shea Stadium to continue its life beyond what it was originally allotted or what seemed remotely possible?

For me right now, it goes down as the night we were all in this together; another night when I was right in the middle of it; the top of the stretch run of the month when I couldn't resist the temptation to inhabit a world of my own and make it my home sweet home; a night when I couldn't have received a better ending not just to a crucial contest in the standings but to the Shea segment of one of my foundation Met relationships. Or it could be that it's simply the night the winning hit spurred me to lift my diminutive friend Laurie several feet in the air for the last time at Shea Stadium — the first time I'd acted on such uninhibited instinct since Benny Agbayani let the dogs out against Aaron Fultz.

I only do things like that on extraordinarily special occasions.

What if the Mets survive, but none of us do?

This is heart-attack stuff, brutal baseball in brutal weather, a Nor'Easter of cruelty and joy and panic and hope buffeting you and threatening to blow you down altogether. How many moments did that game offer to pierce the heart, whether with ecstacy or misery? It started with the look in Pedro Martinez's eyes as the first inning once again frayed and unraveled, a look I hadn't seen before -- a grim awareness that the end of the road is in sight. There was Pedro gamely hanging in there despite all that against Micah Hoffpauir and the Iowa Cubs, then acknowledging the fans who were acknowledging him, who were remembering all he once was, all he would be still if only the fragile body could obey the steely mind, and all he did to bring this franchise back to respectability. And then there was Ricardo Rincon restoring the fans' usual state of mind by instantly and irrevocably giving up a monster shot to Hoffpauir. Nice moment? Not for your September 2008 Mets.

By the way -- Micah Hoffpauir? Between the name and the chin beard, it's like an extra from Witness walked away from the barn-raising to try his hand at this English sport Harrison Ford kept rattling on about. Oh, and with Hoffpauir and Pie and Fontenot and Fukudome and McGehee and Theriot, these Cubs must give copy editors and public-address announcers alike night sweats.

(The Pirates just gave up a walk-off grand slam. Fuck.)

If our Mets live hard, though, they also die hard. You'd think the combination of a no-outs, man on third in the ninth debacle and instant arson a night later might have killed them -- for a while there tonight, I certainly feared it had killed me. (And try not to remember that if Wright had hit a sac fly, we'd be tied for first right now.) But they fought back yet again, and man, that bottom of the eighth was one of those frames that keeps you watching game after hopeless game on summer afternoons when you've got things to do and when they're in extra innings on the West Coast and it's 2:30 a.m. and when you're in the park and it's 48 degrees and they're out of cocoa.

Because you never know.

Because sometimes, as the rain comes down remorselessly and the wind bends and bows everything in sight, Beltran gets a two-out hit and Church gets another two-out hit and Ramon Martinez, who a few weeks ago occupied the Mariana Trench on the second-base depth chart, gets a two-out hit and then Robinson Cancel, who's pretty much the Ramon Martinez of backup catchers, gets a two-out hit only Ryan Church is clearly going to be out at home by a country mile but he takes a desperate detour around Koyie Hill (there's another name to reduce the sports desk to tears) and misses the plate and there's a terrifying, apparently endless moment during which Church is neither safe nor out and then he stretches his hand out onto the plate just before Hill gets there and THE SCORE IS TIED!

Yes, sometimes that happens.

And then sometimes the bullpen doesn't blow it, even though Pedro Feliciano tries and Joe Smith has to face lefty after lefty. And sometimes Jose Reyes harnesses his wild energy for a marvelously determined, disciplined at-bat, and even though Daniel Murphy botches a bunting assignment or a hit-and-run or whatever that was (because something sure got botched) and David Wright is squeezing his bat to splinters again when he needs to let the game come to him, Carlos Beltran will be there. And Carlos Beltran will wait for his pitch and hit a ball on the screws and we'll see that Micah Hoffpauir's seemingly bottomless bag of tricks does not presently include stupendous defense.

Let us pause for a moment, by the way, and bottle this game to break out when people next speak ill of Beltran. He's playing with a bad left knee and aching ribs from that battering against the outfield wall Monday night. He's missed exactly one game all year. He's over 100 RBI for the third-straight year. (Tip of the cap to Jack Curry for a nice profile in the Times the other day.) Beltran's amazing physical gifts, superb instincts and placid demeanor can trick you into thinking he's not going all out, particularly when you compare him with heart-on-the-sleeve grinders like Wright or Murphy. But that's an illusion, one we should be wise enough to see through. Beltran is our Roberto Clemente -- a player who was criticized for his temperament and incessant aches and pains and never truly appreciated the way he should have been. We know we're lucky to have him after a game like tonight's; we should remember it when he glides over to make a catch in left-center that we think is easy only because he made it look that way.

And so. We have survived. Survived to confront, yet again, who we are. It's daunting, no question. We've got no bullpen, we don't know who the hell will start Saturday, we don't know if we'll even get to play Friday. Or Saturday. Or even Sunday. Our enemies include Marlins, Phillies, Brewers, wind, rain, 2007 and ourselves. But what the hell. We've come this far, haven't we?