Rickey Henderson is going to Cooperstown. Pedro Martinez might be going to Miami. Derek Lowe might be coming here -- if he's not going to Atlanta. Oliver Perez? Nobody has ever been able to state with particular confidence where anything propelled by Oliver might be going. Billy Wagner might be coming to Citi Field in August.

And you know what? None of it particularly matters. This is the night of Tim Redding, starter 5a to Jon Niese's 5b, who passed his physical (throwing arm still attached, no signs of blindness or missing legs/feet, check) and is now officially a Met in Waiting.

I say this not to bury Rickey or Pedro or dismiss Billy or diminish Derek or Oliver. I say this because it's the offseason, and as I grow older offseason hypotheticals increasingly strike me as useless teases.

Rickey Henderson is going to Cooperstown, with Jim Rice joining him now that sentiment has battered down the sensibly constructed barriers of statistical comparisons in his case. (Which is not a particularly venal sin: The Hall of Fame is a museum, not a lifeboat, and there are about 14,000 vaguely talented old New York Giants clotting up the ranks thanks to buddies on the Veterans Committee.) My reaction -- and maybe it was the jetlag and the winter -- was underwhelming. Yes, Rickey Henderson lit up Queens briefly in 1999, stealing 37 bases at age 40 and momentarily turning Roger Cedeno into a competent baseball player. But his Met career took a hideous turn in Game 4 of the NLDS against Arizona: Bobby Valentine pulled him for defense (with Melvin Mora throwing out a runner at home about a nanosecond later, instantly and thoroughly proving Bobby had been right), and after that Rickey Henderson went instantly and irredeemably from Colorfully Wise Old Rogue to Gigantic Pain in the Ass. He whined about being lifted, played cards with Bobby Bonilla as a Cinderella season turned to rags, whined in spring training, then jogged to first on a non-home-run and got released. (For which various sins I consigned him to a lower rung of Met Hell.) Unless we hear Rickey will go into the Hall of Fame wearing a Mercury Mets cap and bearing a third eye, his ascension is at best a momentary diversion from snow and ice. It's Rickey's day, and that's well and good, but it's no longer Rickey's time.

Pedro might be a Marlin, we're told -- except for the fact that everybody immediately started denying that Pedro would be anything of the sort. I felt a brief bit of wistfulness at the soon-to-be-debunked news, thinking of what a great teacher Pedro is, about his steely glare on the mound and how much fun it can be to think along with him as he concocts improv baseball jazz from his brain and the situation on the field and whatever he sees in the batter's eyes and whatever pitches he has in his arm that day. Remember that first afternoon as a Met regular, with him walking slowly and boldly past the Reds dugout, like an alley cat just out of reach atop a junkyard dog's fence? So do I. (I also remember fucking Looper blowing the fucking save.) But it was a long time ago: We have seen, in excruciating detail, that Pedro's battered body will no longer do what his crafty brain asks of it. There are no miracles left to invoke -- only a slow decline into sepia and a last couple of lines in the record books that we'll tell our kids not to dwell on. Pedro's time, sad to say, has passed.

Derek Lowe? Oliver Perez? We know the situation by now -- these are the Siamese Twins of the Scott Boras Traveling Circus, unhappily linked until some surgically minded GM comes up with $40 million to separate them. It's been fairly compelling free-agent kabuki, I'll admit, and so far well-played by both Boras and Omar Minaya, who still has all the reason in the world to be patient. This will work itself out whether or not I tie myself into a knot thinking about it in January. Someone's time will come, but it's not here yet.

Billy Wagner? A successful return in August would be a wonderful epilogue to a compelling story, but I've heard these kind of stories too many times before. Everyone is ahead of schedule in January, just as everyone reports to camp in the best shape of his life in February and everyone displays new reserves of grit and determination in March. (You just watch Luis Castillo follow this arc, showing up in St. Lucie slightly less pudding-bellied and coated with Dorito dust, saying all the right things and then collecting two extra-base hits through Memorial Day.) In August Billy Wagner will be 38 -- finding that there are pitches left to coax out of that arm would be miracle enough, so let's not even daydream about his finding smoking fastballs and sly sliders in time for late-season games that matter. Billy's time is quite possibly over, and at best it's farther off than we should allow ourselves to believe.

Which brings us to Tim Redding, a 31-year-old journeyman with a 4.92 ERA and two seasons in which he's won 10 games. Which description isn't meant to discount him or predict, with that irritating certainty of the offseason, that he has nothing to offer the 2009 Mets. Rather, it's to be realistic about what news we actually have and what it actually may mean. There's some decent competition for the fifth starter's slot, no more and no less. Miracle returns? They're nice to imagine, as are big, game-changing checks written by other people. And yes, it's nice to remember past glories -- so long as we repress less-glorious days. But when thinking of the 2009 Mets and their certainties, none of that will do us much good this night. For better, for worse or for unsurprising portions of both, it's the time of Tim.

One of the first football player names I ever knew was that of Ralph Baker. His picture was on one of those stand-up fundraising cards you used to see at cash registers — you know, with slots where you could stick a quarter for charity. I don't recall the cause with which Ralph Baker aligned himself, but there he was, on my barber's counter when I was six years old, urging me to give what I could to fight whatever it was that needed quelling.

No, I don't remember what disease Ralph Baker was against, but I do remember that he was identified as Ralph Baker of the Super Bowl Champion New York Jets. And I remember even more that once I was seven, and the Kansas City Chiefs had won the most recent Super Bowl, that Leo my barber didn't replace the Ralph Baker fundraising card...and that for a long time it sat there on his counter, soliciting change via the visage of a Super Bowl Champion.

I don't know much more about Ralph Baker than what I remember seeing of him at the barber's, but I was intrigued that the thing sat on the counter at George's Madison Avenue (even if there was no Madison Avenue in Long Beach) for years without amendment or correction. The Chiefs won Super Bowl IV, the Colts Super Bowl V, the Cowboys Super Bowl VI...but Ralph Baker was always a Super Bowl Champion New York Jet. The Jets, as we know, have yet to win another Super Bowl, but Ralph Baker and his teammates will always be the champions of Super Bowl III.

That's how it works. They can't take that away from you. Sunday night, before Geico SportsNite, SNY ran one of those quickie promo spots in which a prominent athlete reminds you what channel you're watching. It was Justin Tuck, who introduced himself as being from "the Super Bowl Champion New York Giants". Seconds later, SportsNite came on to analyze why Justin Tuck might want to do a second take.

But Tuck and his teammates, like the fabulous Baker boys of exactly forty years ago today, are still champions. I don't mean the Giants played like champions in succumbing to the Eagles Sunday. They didn't. They played horribly. They deserved to lose and now they are no longer defending Super Bowl champions. But Justin and the Giants, at least those attached to the organization as of February 3, 2008, will still get to call themselves Super Bowl Champions for the rest of their lives. Nobody's going to amend or correct Tuck's promo spot just as nobody made Ralph Baker do a second take after December 20, 1969, the bitter Shea day when the Jets lost their AFL divisional playoff game to the Chiefs and concluded their title defense the way most title defenses end: without continuation.

In watching SNY recap the Giants' swampy Sunday, I was concerned about how bad Eli Manning looked. He looked as bad as he did prior to the 2007 playoffs. Wow, I thought, was last year's postseason the aberration? Was today more indicative of what his career is going to be? Then I stopped myself in that thought. Even if Eli never matches his run through the Bucs, the Cowboys, the Packers and the Patriots, so what? He had that. He won a championship. SNY noted yesterday was the third time in four years that the Giants were knocked out in the first round of the playoffs. So what? I thought again. In the one year that didn't happen, the Giants won the Super Bowl. (Never mind that making of playoffs four straight years is pretty good.)

That's all it takes in a given career or era. You win it once and you're set. From a practical standpoint, the player and the team can't conduct themselves with that knowledge top of mind. Every year is a new year just like every game is a new game. The 2008 Giants are disappointed, perhaps devastated today, and that's reasonable. That's their job. Yet it should reveal itself a temporary condition. Down the road, Manning and Tuck and Pierce and Jacobs and Coughlin (who undoubtedly would fine such talk) will be Super Bowl Champion New York Giants first and foremost. The years when they didn't win won't completely go away, but the year they did win is what will be remembered ahead of everything else. They sucked yesterday, but they're golden for eternity.

It had been many moons since I watched a team for which I root semi-dramatically lay down its crown and scepter, because none of the teams for which I root had held either for the longest time prior to February 3, 2008. It made me sad, initially, to realize my favorite football team was no longer the Super Bowl champion of record. It hadn't been that big a deal to me when they were en route a year ago, but after it happened, something clicked. For months, no matter what else was going on, I'd think of the Giants gutting it out in Green Bay and Glendale, and it made me warm all over. I'd been easing off from professional football since probably the day after January 27, 1991, the previous time the Giants had become Super Bowl Champions. I must have decided nothing in that realm would ever feel as fulfilling again, so football began to matter less and less to me.

But then last January and February...and the Giants breathing smoke in that bitter cold...and hermetically sealed in the desert...and riding in cars on Lower Broadway...to realize that was all officially in the past as of yesterday afternoon saddened me for a little while yesterday. I liked being a fan of the defending champions. It didn't make me watch their regular season any more closely than I'd watched the dozen preceding it, but it gave me that warmth. Not heat, not hubris, just warmth that a team that had been a part of my life, if not an overwhelming part of it for almost a generation, had reached the heights. They'll sell anybody with cash championship merchandise. I bought mine with pride.

My Size XLII t-shirts still say they're the Super Bowl Champion New York Giants. And they always will.