And to think it seemed mildly insane to have an off-day after a two-game series. After whatever the hell just happened for the last two nights, we could all use a week listening quietly to whale songs in a warm bath in a dim, candlelit room.

Worry of the moment: What if we make it to October and everybody's arms are on E? In this current turn through the rotation, Pedro has looked ordinary and both Ollie and Pelf have been awful. You'll find Aaron Heilman under that heading as well, as per usual, but tonight he was joined by the normally stalwart Brian Stokes, who couldn't locate anything but his fastball and found that wasn't enough. Joe Smith was impeccable (with a lot of help from David Wright), as was Luis Ayala, but when it was 7-1 Mets the devout hope was that tonight's blog entry would be a meditation on the long-delayed debut of Bobby Parnell, instead of more hosannas for guys who could have used a breather. As if. It makes sense that Parnell's baptism has been kept on hold pending a blowout, but there's no such thing as a blowout when the Mets are involved these days.

But still. Let's hope we wind up having October to worry about. If Wright hits the way he did tonight, that would be a big help getting us there -- and would further build his legend. By now it's a famous story that David accelerated his rise to the big leagues by working less hard, learning not to exhaust himself in St. Lucie pregame. So it was a bit scary to see him out there yesterday afternoon in the batting cage, taking extra hacks with both Howard Johnson and Jerry Manuel offering counsel. But Wright seems to thrive on not doing things the easy way -- he's like John Henry with a bat, convinced that even more hard work is the best way to break down whatever barrier's come between him and what he can do. Yet he's often right -- when talk radio begins to buzz about how tired he looks, you know a big game is coming. So of course extra BP, instead of tying his mind into even more of a knot, was a preview of a 4-for-4 night and a home run on a nice, line-drive swing that gave us enough insurance to downgrade tonight's game from nightmarish to merely scary. And while it would take a truly magnanimous Met fan to say Wright deserved a Gold Glove last year, this year it would take a truly mean-spirited one to say he doesn't. In the late innings tonight Wright's glove -- and sometimes just his bare hand -- seemed to be all that separated us from disaster.

If the Mets are showing the kind of pluck and patience they sorely lacked a September ago, the Nats seem like a rowdy study hall that's stopped respecting Mr. Acta's authority. The talent is there -- Ryan Zimmerman, Lastings Milledge and the somehow-resurrected Cristian Guzman have obvious firepower, and Elijah Dukes is nothing less than a force of nature, primal rage constantly boiling out of a vessel too flawed to contain it. But the Nats lost in no small part because they kept aiming the gun at their own feet. Exactly how many lineouts to center does Milledge have to convert into hits before he plays at normal depth? (Cracked Keith: "He looks like he's out there to pull the number off the wall.") What lesson is learned when Dukes takes several hours to leave the field after a groundout, delaying his exit further to incite an already-hostile crowd? What makes Anderson Hernandez think he can automatically get time with Ayala nearly in his windup after the Nats took forever to get him up to the plate with an out to go? Then there was the surreal sight of no less than seven men converging on first base at high speed after Damion Easley popped up and left Fernando Tatis scrambling on the wrong side of second in the fifth. Who would get there first? Tatis? Easley? Kory Casto? Emilio Bonifacio? Garrett Mock? Wil Nieves? The first-base ump? Somehow none of them collided, and somehow Tatis managed to find first before anyone in the gray and navy scrum could. Nieves' amazed disgust at the blown play at his feet told you everything you need to know about the Nats' 2008 -- yes, they're young and it's been a long slog, but the lack of discipline on the field was startling.

Greg was in the park tonight; so were Emily and her dad. (As the Nats stumbled around in the seventh, I text-messaged NO DAIRY QUEEN FOR ANY OF YOU!!! to her, a household joke borrowed and transformed from a wistful quote about a long-ago playoff game.) For attending they got 23 runs' worth of offense, a pretty nice night with a hint of autumn (which of course hints at autumn baseball), and generous portions of joy and terror. But they missed a great show by Gary, Ron and Keith. There was Keith's crack about Milledge, Darling's dry assessment of Pelfrey making Dukes fish after Elijah's mini-eruption ("fastball in, slider away -- it's worked for a hundred years"), and Gary's observation in the bottom of the eighth that 11-10 would be a fitting final score for the Nats' last appearance at Shea Stadium, since the Montreal Expos began their existence with an 11-10 win there on Opening Day in 1969. As a collective those three -- and Howie Rose on the radio side -- are not only great play-by-play guys and top-notch analysts, but also Met historians of the highest rank. We should all of us spend a few weeks listening to lesser announcers chronicle our team, just to remind us how lucky we are. (Hmm. How about October?)

Granted, none of us much minded that Wright's home run made it 13-10 and so spoiled Gary's symmetry. Just as we may find a strange comfort in the fact that the Mets again have 17 to play but find themselves 3.5 games ahead, not seven.

We have half the lead we had last year. Fine. We also have twice the team.

I don't know what our new closer's entrance music is. I look up in the top of the ninth and he's on the mound. A few minutes later, there's a receiving line of Mets exchanging hearty congratulations.

A fella could get used to this.

Best wishes and speedy recovery to one William Edward Wagner, as indicated here and there. Sorry to learn his son is having a tough time dealing with his dad's immediate future (so did John Franco's boy when he went out for more than a year, if you recall). It's a tough break for Billy Wagner.

It could still be a blow to the Mets, but for now, life with Luis Ayala is agreeable. He throws strikes. He remains calm. And he enters games with no fanfare, no different from anybody else in the Met bullpen.

The cult of the closer is no longer in effect in Queens. It's refreshing. That's not a knock on Wagner. It's a knock on Wagner's role...Rivera's role...Hoffman's role...the role of everybody paid astonishingly big bucks for an inning's work. As exciting and as assuring as guys like those have been and can be, we've seen how terribly awry games can go when closers are crutches, when managers robotically hand them the ball in the ninth because there is a three-run lead and three outs to go. Last night, actually, I would have been just as happy to have seen Brian Stokes pitch another inning after he threw eleven effective pitches in the eighth.

Anybody have Stokes-Ayala in the pennant race setup-closer pool in March? Just wondering.

Your first-place Mets are built on those you didn't see coming, oodles of newbies and reams of reclamations. It's not at all surprising that Tatis Fever should spread to the relief corps. It's no longer shocking that I see Fernando Tatis is starting and breathe a sigh of relief. And it should no longer be in dispute that Carlos Delgado is a legitimate Most Valuable Player candidate.

I've been watching Mets baseball for forty years. I've seen Dave Kingman go on mammoth home run tears. I've seen Darryl Strawberry ride ginormous power surges. I've seen Mike Piazza drive ball after ball over wall after wall. But brothers and sisters, I've never seen anything like Carlos Delgado these last few months, not for sustained performance, not for clutch timing, not for sheer impact on the Mets' fortunes. He comes to bat and we're no longer earthbound. We're living on Planet Delgado. There is no gravity in this place. Everything is up, up and away!

Calibrate all you like. Weigh his crappy first half if you must. Bring up Pujols and Braun and Howard and Ramirez and every worthy you've got. Parade Wright and Reyes down Main Street as you see fit. But Carlos Delgado is the true candidate of change in the National League. Carlos Delgado began hitting, the Mets began winning. Carlos Delgado hits at the most opportune times. Carlos Delgado gives the impression he cannot be retired. It takes a nation of millions to hold him back, and even then I'd put my money on Carlos. If Roy Hobbs hops off a train to fire one past Carlos Delgado, Carlos Delgado naturally ends Roy Hobbs' pitching career before a single bullet is fired (and boy, wouldn't moviemaking have been better off?).

In the past three weeks alone, he's defeated Atlanta, destroyed Houston, demolished Philadelphia twice, demoralized Milwaukee and diminished Washington until they were reduced to nattering nabobs of negative Nationalism. The Mets are where without him? Stuck forever in the middle of June.

You probably can't give points for this, but oh the electricity every one of his at-bats generates at Shea these days, last night no exception. When he was deprived of his last swing in the eighth on a bizarre batter's interference call, it smacked of professional wrestling, as if somebody in a gray uniform rigged the process to deprive the crowd of its hero...but just you wait until the crooked ref — I mean ump — turns his back, 'cause Carlos will prevail in the end. You can just feel it. The 35 homers, 103 RBI and standing of his team confirms it if you require less ethereal proof.

If I were filling out an MVP ballot, Delgado is first and maybe I'd split the tenth-place vote between Howie Rose and Wayne Hagin, at least for Tuesday night. My meticulously choreographed September Sheagoing grazed another pothole perimeter when my companion for the evening had to bail in deference to a most unfortunate emergency. I missed him, but I resorted to trusty Plan B: use the unoccupied seat for my stuff and fish out my radio and listen while I watched live. I haven't done that since the last time somebody couldn't make it, circa 2001. It felt very comfortable. Maybe not enough to get up and yell a lot at a game that invited much vocal angst — do that and you're the weirdo who came alone — but plenty appealing in its homey pure play at Shea way. I wasn't planning on having a final solo game this month, but I wasn't really planning on plumping on behalf of closer Luis Ayala and savior Carlos Delgado either.

Make all the plans you like. Baseball will do what it wants.

Maybe you've heard: We supposedly have an easy schedule the rest of the way. Four with the Cubs, yeah, but they could well have wrapped things up by then, and the rest is all the dregs of the National League East.

Well, beyond the elementary fact that we're Met fans and so never assume anything is gift-wrapped for us, we know better. There can be no tougher opponent than a team that's out of it and is sending out young players trying to earn their spurs for next year -- pitchers you've never seen and a lineup of guys handed the added incentive of a chance to derail someone else's postseason aspirations. The Nationals and Marlins played a key role in sending us to our doom in 2007, and the Braves may have been eliminated tonight but they still have Bobby Cox and Chipper Jones, which is nightmare fuel enough. Whatever the standings say, it gives me no pleasure whatsoever to see all those WSHs and ATLs and FLAs awaiting us. (Same warning applies for the Phils, about whom more in a moment -- they've got essentially the same schedule, except their four-spot comes against the Brewers.)

For three and a half innings tonight, it was like a bad dream of September 2007. There was David Wright battling himself, Oliver Perez pitching like a spooked horse, and the Nationals rising up in indignation in the top of the fourth after the Mets took a 5-2 lead. Walk, strikeout, single, single, single, single, single, single, walk and finally a merciful but awfully late GIDP. While first Oliver and then Nelson Figueroa ducked and covered, there was Anderson Hernandez trying to prove to us that he could too hit, and Lastings Milledge looking for vengeance, and Ryan Zimmerman back from the dead and looking far too alive for my tastes, and the horrid Aaron Boone and various Anonynats and I swear they were hitting for about two days. 5-2 Mets turned into 7-5 Nats, and only the absence of Willie Randolph standing at the dugout railing like Captain Ahab assured me that it wasn't, in fact, 2007.

But you know what else was different?

Brian Schneider led off the bottom of the fourth with a single.

Seems like a little thing, but it mattered: Rather than looking unmanned and undone, the Mets came right back, putting together a rally on two singles and a groundout to tie the game. Yes, Fernando Tatis popped up with two outs and the bases loaded, but the counterpunch was enough to send the demons away.

OK, so in the top of the fifth the Nats retook the lead against an ineffective Brandon Knight. Guess what? Damion Easley led off the bottom of the fifth by drawing a walk. That didn't lead to a run, but, again, it was enough to serve as an exorcism. The Mets weren't panicking, but working good counts and turning in good at-bats. And eventually, one of Manny Acta's moves backfired under that pressure: He brought in Charlie Manning to turn around Carlos Beltran and neutralize Carlos Delgado, and the first Carlos slammed a two-run homer for the lead and the second Carlos sent a mortar off the K board above the relievers' heads. 10-8 Mets, and between peerless relief and nice defense from Damion Easley and Wright (whose offensive struggles have been invisible in the field), we got it to Luis Ayala, who went 1-2-3 against the team that cast him aside as a failed mop-up guy.

Do we lose this game in 2007? Of course we do -- we lost this game twice against the Nats a year ago, along with three others that were thoroughly nauseating in other ways. (Don't click those links if you've got a bad heart, a weak stomach, or both.) But that was last year: 10-8 isn't normally a thing of beauty, but it was beautiful tonight.

And maybe there's magic in that untidy score: For a few minutes later and 100-odd miles south, Matt Lindstrom got Pat Burrell to whack a 2-0 pitch to center for the final out of a 10-8 Marlins win.

None of this ensures anything -- I don't need to be reminded that those 2007 Mets started September 8-1. But it ensured tonight, and that's more than enough until the next tonight.