No two words are any more Amazin' in the Met lexicon than Game Six. The '86 playoffs. The '86 World Series. The '99 NLCS. You can throw in the 2006 version while you're at it.

But there was another sixth game not that long ago, in 2005, to be precise. It wasn't in October. It was April — April 10. It was the 0-5 Mets taking on their archnemeses, the perennially defending Eastern Division champion Atlanta Braves. And it was a doozy. John Smoltz could not be touched in any meaningful fashion for seven innings: 103 pitches, 15 strikeouts, 6 scattered hits, no walks, no runs. His opponent was Pedro Martinez. Pedro Martinez was everything the Mets thought they were signing. His only troubling inning through seven was the fourth: a one-out walk to Chipper Jones, a two-out RBI double to Johnny Estrada. Smoltz led 1-0 heading to the eighth.

The eighth was Smoltz's undoing. Jose Reyes singled. Miguel Cairo sacrificed him to second. Carlos Beltran walloped a two-run homer to right. Pedro now led 2-1. Exit Smoltz. Enter Cliff Floyd, homering off Tom Martin. After a Doug Mientkiewicz double, David Wright homered off Ramon Colon. Suddenly Pedro had a 5-1 lead and he was a possessive dog with your shoe from there: a complete game, 9-strikeout 2-hitter. The Mets were in the win column and the first note of a hopeful new era was successfully struck.

That was the sixth game four years ago. It was a classic. And it might not have been as good as today's sixth game, even if we did lose this one.

Marlins 2 Mets 1 isn't what we wanted to pack up prior to the Super Home Opener (FYI, we didn't win our last game prior to entering the Polo Grounds or Shea Stadium either), but this isn't the sixth game of the World Series or the League Championship Series. It was the sixth game of a season, that has 156 remaining. We're 3-3. We can live with being on the wrong end of 2-1. It's not often you don't feel like a chump for saying that.

Today's sixth-game classic was brought to us by Johan Santana and Josh Johnson. Each was better than the other. Johnson got the win. Santana, who's done quite a bit of breath-taking versus the Marlins, took the loss that had to be assigned based on the score. But neither outshone either. They both sparkled in that way you want to show every baseball fan who has ever bemoaned the demise of starting pitching and every non-fan who wonders what's the big deal about a game in which almost nobody scores.

Santana hooked up in a perfectly respectable 2-1 game with Aaron Harang on Monday. It wasn't a duel, though. This was a duel. This was the best pitcher in baseball and one of his most talented counterparts. This was the master working change, slider and fastball versus the kid going away, away, away and hitting his spots hard. They made their opposing batters look clueless, yet somehow nobody (outside of the vapor-locking security guard who touched a live ball) seemed particularly foolish in this. These were good and occasionally great major league hitters being overmatched by unquestionably stupendous major league pitching. Isn't that how baseball at its purest is more or less supposed to work?

Sure, the decision rested in the hands — or off the glove — of Daniel Murphy, but that's just a break. The Marlins got the break the Mets didn't. Without it, maybe the Mets get the first break in the ninth when Carlos Beltran, who looked awful all day, finally got to Johnson for an RBI (driving in Delgado who'd had no luck prior...but got a bit of a break when Bob Davidson didn't call give Johnson strike three). But it happened. We've seen Murphy stumble a bit toward the left field fence and come down with the ball. This time we saw it bounce away. That's baseball.

You wish this was baseball every day. You wish a 2-1 double gem wasn't a diamond in the 162-game rough. You wish your guy could strike out 13 in seven innings more often. You wish your guy could go the distance the way their guy did, too. You wish you could watch both lineups hang tough against state-of-the-art pitching the way ours did in the ninth, running out everything and finding places to hit the ball toward the way Delgado and Beltran (and Wright and Church) did at the end. You wished, as a Mets fan, that Brett Carroll would have as much trouble with Ryan Church's sinking line drive as Daniel Murphy did with Cody Ross' deep fly. It wasn't to be. Santana and Parnell — it seemed an injustice to turn this afternoon over to a reliever, any reliever — combined on a 14-K 3-hitter and allowed no earned runs (a mere coincidence Doc Gooden was in the stands?). Johnson went all the way, giving up one run on five hits, yet quoting even that stellar line diminishes his accomplishment.

We lost the sixth game of the year. But if you watched it intently, consider yourself a winner for 2 hours and 4 minutes.

Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

Face it, folks. It's not just in a parallel universe where the Marlins are the National League East's team of tradition. Consider the senior circuit's ballpark seniority rankings in the wake of the intertwined events of September 28, 2008 and April 13, 2009:

1) Wrigley Field, built 1914, home of the Cubs since 1916
2) Dodger Stadium, built 1962
3) Shea Stadium, built 1964
3) Dolphin Stadium, built 1987, home of the Marlins since 1993

Look Who's No. 3! Joe Robbie Pro Player Whatever It's Called This Week Stadium (and I should probably go easy on the name-calling since I wouldn't necessarily bank on Citi Field being Citi Field forever). While everybody else but the Cubs and Dodgers have bullrushed the modern, the Marlins stay with the staid, try only the tried and remain acquiescent to their aqua playpen, at least until their new place is ready in a few years. Everywhere else we go on a regular basis, including the steakhouse Lonn Trost built come June, is relatively brand spanking new and emits a certain degree of unsettledness to the home viewer.

Not the Traditional Three. You know you're gonna get that ivy at Wrigley, those mountains backdropping Chavez Ravine and revolving home plate signage that stays with you from the Fish tank. Perhaps because South Florida, even in reasonably flush times, doesn't turn out many sponsors for its ballclub, you tend to see the same advertisements over and over in the course of a game. For years, there was a Publix ad I couldn't get out of my head (there was always a deal on Tropicana). More recently there's one for a hospital that uses a pineapple in its logo. How it got to Miami from Honolulu, or why a pineapple denotes sound Floridian medical care, I'm not sure, but it sure says Marlins to me.

Dolphin Stadium is the only ballpark I've seen with ads for the Spanish-language Univision network, which is understandable given the area's Latin-American demographics, yet a little mystifying since from what I can tell Univision doesn't broadcast any Marlins games. In fact, no over-the-air outlet broadcasts any Marlins games if I've read the team's Web site correctly; a whole bunch of their games are not even cablecast in South Florida (yet we grow a tad cranky if we have to go forty minutes relying solely on evidence of things not seen, a.k.a. Howie and Wayne).

Univision has two billboards that rotate through Marlins games. One is for the Miami affiliate, Channel 23, which was English-language and showed hour upon hour of cartoons when I was a kid and my family would hightail it to a Collins Avenue motel for Christmas week every year. My mother would remind me "we're not paying good money for you to sit in the room and watch TV, go out and get some sun!" but I was steadfastly fascinated that Channel 23 had the bizarre Brutus brand of Popeye while we in New York received the Bluto or "normal" version, so I stayed inside and pale. Channel 23's current accent is emphasized in its Dolphin Stadium billboard: NOTICIAS 23. As we steered toward a potential whitewashing of the men in teal, I kept thinking...

NOTICIAS 23
Marlins 0

...though Mets 8 Marlins 4 will do just fine.

The other Univision advertisement seems designed to sell advertising to local businesses asking themselves about "A solution for growth today?" The answer provided: "It's right here in plain Spanish."

Univision's message may be intended for the Greater Miami-Fort Lauderdale commerce community, but it describes pretty well how the Mets solved their challenges Saturday night. Simply, it was Livàn Hernandez, the Cuban pitcher you weren't necessarily expecting on the roster two months ago, and Luis Castillo, the Dominican second baseman you probably wanted no part of two seconds before he collected his fourth hit of the game. You might require a down payment of 400 hits before accepting you're saddled with Castillo, as unpopular as any regular in recent memory or any language, but he was nothing but a solution Saturday.

I watched Luis interviewed by Kevin Burkhardt after it was all over, following his reaching base five times, and I felt very good for he who has been despised and dismissed and probably will be again. He may not be much good in the long run, but he couldn't possibly be as bad as he's been almost every game he's played since becoming a Met in August 2007. He seems like a genuinely nice fellow lost in a horribly deep forest. His inner peace is not my responsibility, but I hope he gets a few more hits for his own good this afternoon so he can be greeted by nothing more virulent than silence Monday night. Boo the Padres, boo the prices, but don't boo Castillo on Citi Field's very first night of official existence. Wait 'til Wednesday, at any rate.

Hernandez, meanwhile, gave us the upside of Livàn. Like Luis, he's been around forever and is not a mystery. His jersey blouses out toward the belt, his pitches max out somewhere south of fast and he generally puts in a respectable night's work regardless of results. There will be Livàn starts when it seems possible the opposition might put up a tally in the low UHFs, but last night wasn't one of those nights, as he kept the Marlins on mute clear into the seventh. The bullpen could do with some tightening (it looked looser than Livàn's uniform top), but that's why big leads — thank you Jose, gracias Ryan — are such buenas noticias.

Ain't that good news? Hombre, ain't that news?

Available now, in English only for the time being: Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.