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.