The ball struck by Carlos Delgado on an 0-2 pitch from Eric Gagne in the eighth kind of floated out to right-center. It wasn't one of those tracers that vanishes at a sharp angle suggesting it was hit by a 20-foot-tall man, as the Other Carlos's shot did off Kevin Gregg a couple of nights ago. No, this one drifted. And drifted. And kept on drifting, until Corey Hart surrendered and watched it settle into the seats: Mets 3, Brewers 2, just like that.

The Brewers' hitters are scary -- but so's their bullpen, a blueprint we know all too well. This one looked like trouble early, with a triple bouncing off Daniel Murphy's glove, after which he fell down. That led to a 1-0 lead against Johan Santana, who then gathered himself in the second and was flawless until the sixth, when he somehow balked in a run. I was amazed. So, by the expression on his face, was Johan.

Part of that amazement had to be that the Mets seemed stuck in another offensive brownout, doing absolutely nothing against Ben Sheets. (David Wright looked particularly lost -- it was painful watching him get eaten alive by Carlos Villanueva and Gagne.) But Sheets was betrayed, first by his groin and then by his relievers. Murphy continued to build his legend with a pair of cool, steely-eyed at-bats, singling off Villanueva on a full count to move Jose Reyes to third in the sixth, then taking Gagne to 3-2 before doubling to lead off the eighth. Carlos Beltran had himself a pretty good day, aside from taking out home-plate umpire Ed Rapuano, who kicked him in the knee. And Ryan Church rifled an opposite-field double for a key insurance run and a hopeful September sign.

With Santana excused after sixth, though, there was the small matter of our bullpen and its continuing misadventures -- slapstick Johan has seen all too much of this year. But none of that was in evidence this time. First old friend Nelson Figueroa led the 10-strong corps of New Orleans recallees (is this an official holiday for Mets by the Numbers?), pitching in with a scoreless inning that gave him a W. Then Pedro Feliciano crushed Prince Fielder (whom I'd like to see in a sumo ring with Robinson Cancel) with sliders, and then Joe Smith turned in what might have been his most impressive performance of the year, carving up Hart with sliders and then outguessing Mike Cameron, a sequence that ended with Cancel catching Smith's final fastball and pumping his fist, his weight shifting toward the dugout before Rapuano even punched Cameron out. And closer-for-the-moment Luis Ayala was spotless in wrapping up a very satisfying Labor Day victory.

But this was Delgado's game, as so many have been recently. Taking the field against the Yankees on June 27th, Delgado was hitting .229 with 11 HR and 35 RBI, and we all wanted Marlon Anderson or Xavier Nady or Mike Carp or Anybody Not Named Carlos Delgado to report to first base ASAP. Since then, Delgado has 20 home runs and 60 RBI. Forget good and great -- that's otherworldly.

It would be easy to turn this into a moral that we shouldn't be so hasty in counting out a proud player with a history of impressive numbers -- easy, but not terribly accurate. Because if the Carlos Delgado of June 26th wasn't done, he was sure offering an excellent imitation of a baseball player who was. We all could see it: His bat had slowed, he was naked before any pitch on the outer half of the plate, and his defense, while never terrific, had decayed to embarrassing levels. It was terrible to watch a fiercely intelligent man baffled by evidence that he'd gotten old a couple of years ahead of schedule -- hardly a unique tragedy in baseball, but deeply sad nonetheless, and a huge blow to the Mets' chances in 2008.

What's happened since then? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe Delgado's workaday explanation is right, and it really did take all that time for him to make adjustments and eliminate some bad habits. Maybe he really did hate Willie Randolph that much, and Jerry Manuel's combination of pats on the back and challenges (remember the dig about Delgado getting his uniform dirty?) helped him find a higher gear. Given our times, I'm surprised more-cynical hypotheses haven't made the rounds -- I'll take it as testament to Delgado's sterling reputation that they haven't.

Whatever the answer is, the results have been extraordinary. Delgado has gone from a guy with about as much chance of playing for the 2009 Mets as I do to the presumptive starter and a $12 million bargain. Not so long ago, he was a black hole in the lineup. Now, he's the New York Met -- not Reyes or Wright or Beltran -- whose spot you pray will come back around. Because you know there's a real chance he'll rescue us yet again.

On our last morning on LBI, we had a final breakfast, for which we were joined by longtime Faith and Fear commentor Charlie Hangley and his wife Sarah, who were arriving as we were departing.

Outside the pancake house, a Yankee fan had scoped out Charlie and me and our Met shirts and decided we must know whether the Yankees had won or lost the previous night. As it happens I did know, but I sent a text message to Google via my phone so the Yankee fan would have to wait for ill tidings. (Yes, I'm a bad person.) And then, having told him that the Yankees lost, I jauntily volunteered to find the Red Sox and Rays scores for him as well. (Which I also already knew. OK, so I'm a really bad person.) This took a little while; settled at our table, Charlie and I chatted briefly and fairly amiably with the Yankee fan, who didn't seem like such a bad sort. (Did I feel bad then? Yes. A little.) He was realistic about his own team's bleak forecast, but seemed oddly confident in ours: The Mets, he said with no-big-whoop certainty, were going to the playoffs.

Charlie and I immediately fell over ourselves appending qualifiers and hypotheticals to that, and apparently we did so with the kind of well-rehearsed ceremony generally seen in religious rituals -- because a day later Emily was still chuckling about the scene. This show of backpedaling and poor-mouthing amused her, but it must have confused the hell out of the Yankee fan, because Yankee fans don't bother with qualifiers -- they chest-thump and bray about their inevitable postseason triumph until silenced by mathematics. (And then they blink for a second and start woofing about rings, baby. This is why I only felt a little bad.)

But while Charlie and I did everything but throw salt over our shoulders at the prediction of a September to remember, at least for me the ceremony was largely unconscious. I'm strangely serene, given that Labor Day has arrived with us holding a lead of a wafer-thin single game.

I'm sure part of it is that last year we were up seven with 17 to play (will that combination of numbers ever not rattle around in our brains?), so I know even more than I normally would that a one-game lead can portend any number of reversals before the final judgment. But still -- how am I not gripped by panic? Or at least more worried?

I think it's that this strangest of baseball campaigns has turned weirdly sweet. The first half was one of the more maddening stretches I've ever endured as a baseball fan, a continuation of 2007's lethargic mediocrity which was inexcusable coming as it did after the Collapse. But then Willie got axed (awkwardly but deservedly) and Jerry arrived, and he blew away the gloom and doubt that had hovered over the Mets for a year. And with that change in the metaphysical weather, strange things started happening. The left-field wormhole that swallowed Moises Alou and Brady Clark and Angel Pagan and Marlon Anderson and Trot Nixon and Chris Aguila inexplicably spat out Daniel Murphy and Nick Evans, Double-A roommates who have formed the best platoon of out-of-position rookies one could possibly imagine. Ryan Church endured a second concussion, strange medical advice and forced inactivity, but that allowed the unlikely resurrection of Fernando Tatis, living a "Blues Brothers" plot come to life. (Seriously. Like Jake and Elwood, he's on a mission from God.) El Duque never came off the shelf, but Mike Pelfrey reclaimed his curve ball and found himself. Luis Castillo hit the DL with his bad knees and unfathomably stupid contract for company, but up stepped a revived Damion Easley and Cleveland castoff Argenis Reyes, who shared not just a last name but also a boyhood friendship with his double-play partner. And of course Carlos Delgado, proclaimed by most any judge of horseflesh as ready for the glue factory, turned out to have some thoroughbred left in him.

Put all these unlikely events together and you got a team that not only won again but was fun to watch doing so -- in a gleefully improvised, by turns terrifying and thrilling hell-for-leather way. Given how many times the 2008 Mets have already cheated the hangman, why start in now with worrying about John Maine's shoulder, or Billy Wagner's elbow, or the entire bullpen's hideousness, or that sliver of a lead? It feels like we'll think of something -- and if that something doesn't work, well, who'd have dreamed we'd get this far? It's Labor Day and our stack is just a single chip higher than what the Phillies have brought to the table, but we're playing with house money. So what the heck -- let's double down and see what happens.

The public address system at Keyspan Park Sunday interrupted its incessant drumbeat of sound effects, song fragments and overbearing Cyclone Morning Zoo demeanor (our one-hundred fifth caller who gives us the phrase that pays wins...AN ADVIL!) to announce something of surpassing importance:

The New York Mets are in first place on September First!

The Mets' win in Miami was a final and the Phillies' win in Chicago couldn't change the math. It wasn't yet September, but we knew that when it would be, it would be the Mets by a length. That's a helluva way to start your final month.

The minor league crowd gave it a major league cheer. It was a most pleasant grace note to a lovely late afternoon/early evening on Coney Island. While my friend Frank's 2003 assessment of Cyclone games as "an A.D.D. patient's delight" has only intensified in its accuracy, the oceanfront setting is still heavenly, the competitive guilelessness is still charming and the company — the Princes were invited by the Frys — proved more sublime than ever. Couldn't tell you if I saw any of the Mets of tomorrow yesterday, though the PA did point out that one of the Met homers Sunday was the first ever struck in the bigs by "former Cyclone Nick Evans!" (Everything announced at Keyspan ends with an exclamation point!)

I'd lost touch with the Cyclones. I hadn't been to one of their games since the night Katrina touched down in New Orleans (hmmm...maybe I should just stay away from these things for the Gulf Coast's sake). When introduced to our single-A short-season unit by Jason seven summers ago, I took them moderately seriously. I watched whatever games popped up on cable and tracked their progress in the New York-Penn standings. Their sadly abbreviated playoff run in September 2001 was a compelling B-story to the baseball season at large. But over the years, the Cyclones and their not immediately accessible to me ballpark faded from view and concern. They didn't do anything wrong; I just got out of the habit.

It was good to have the Cyclones and Keyspan back on Sunday. It was good to see Brooklyn again, the Brooklyn one enters from Queens. That's how I knew the borough of my birth as a child, when I was dragged semi-regularly to visit doctors and relatives and such, mostly by my mother. A graduate of Erasmus Hall High School and Brooklyn College, she would tell me how great it was to grow up in Flatbush way back when, how you could leave your doors unlocked and walk the neighborhood at all hours and boy were "we" lucky to get out just as it was "turning". In 2002, on my last anxiety-riddled attempt to drive the relatively short distance between Long Island and Brooklyn, I meandered down local roads and was shocked at how much I recognized and remembered from those involuntary trips of my youth. I even kind of knew my way around. It left me feeling a bit proprietary about the streets — Nostrand Avenue, Cortelyou Road, Ocean Parkway — where I didn't grow up but very well could have. Sunday's journey, albeit by rail, reawakened that ancestral corner of my mind.

I also flashed back, as the N pulled into its Coney Island terminus, on my first visit to this part of town. It was the summer I was 10, a day camp outing to ride Go Carts. I reluctantly climbed into one, hit the gas as told and immediately crashed into a wall. No wonder I grew up to eventually fear and loathe driving.

But let's not leave this trip to Brooklyn there. Let's leave it where we came in: the Mets in first place, the Cyclones streaking toward a playoff spot, the sense of knowing where one came from almost palpable. If I could just coax those Gwen Stefani hooks into making a sweet escape from my head, I couldn't ask for a better end to summer.