Flashback Friday: I Saw The Decade End is on hold as my well-being teeters on the verge of September 2007-type behavior. Just went to the doctor, and while he says I'll live, I don't believe the prognosis. Anyway, I was halfway through writing the latest installment when I decided I didn't like my head being as hot as Carlos Beltran has been at the plate, so I'm going to put aside what I was working on (even though it's got that topical thing going for this Friday in particular) and present a Best of FAFIF from the greatest Mets West Coast trip ever. Please travel back, won't you, to June 8, 2006 and enjoy my unsurpassed talent-evaluation skills as they appeared under the headline "Suddenly Smitten".

I'm reading a pretty good book called A Great Day in Cooperstown about how the Hall of Fame came to be and the festive occasion its opening was. All the immortals who were still alive in 1939 — Walter Johnson, Cy Young, Tris Speaker, a recently retired Babe Ruth — came to Upstate New York and caused quite the commotion. I wondered what it must have been like to have witnessed modern baseball in its formative years, to have seen these players create the game as we know it, to possibly bump into one of them on Main Street when they showed up to get enshrined.

It must have been tremendous, I decided, but it's all right that I wasn't there then because if I had been, I wouldn't be around now. And if I weren't around now, I wouldn't be seeing Lastings Milledge in his formative years recreating the game we will know in the 21st century.

That's how far gone I am over this kid who's been a Met for a week and change. I had held it in check until last night, but by this morning, as I savored the back page of the late edition of the Daily News which documented his ARM & HAMMER...well, WOO! as the scoreboard often says. I'm head over heels for Lastings Milledge.

Yes, he's to be mentioned with the residents of Pantheon Row. Of course I'm searching my mental database for whether we've ever had anybody like him (we haven't) or whether we've produced and employed a trio of homegrowners like Reyes, Wright and him simultaneously (we also haven't). I've skipped over the ifs in record time, slid around the ands, and slammed the buts over the leftfield wall. No ifs, ands or buts, Lastings Milledge is as awesome a Met as I could imagine.

Xavier Nady? Swell fella. I hope Willie finds him some at-bats.

I've flipped through all the obvious precedents. He's not Ron Swoboda. He's not Mike Vail. He's not Alex Ochoa. He's not Benny Agbayani. He's not Victor Diaz or Craig Brazell or Mike Jacobs even. I have no evidence, only intuition, and I'm likin' what I'm feelin'. He's not Darryl Strawberry, either, though after watching him do everything right last night, I no longer mean that in the "don't compare him to a superstar yet," but rather "Darryl was no Lastings, not at this stage of his career"...career meaning, if I'm not mistaken, eight games to date.

It's not much of a sample, but what sample it is makes me want to order the complete set right now. Lastings Milledge has filled up my senses like a night in the forest, like the mountains in springtime, like a walk in the rain.

Holy Honus Wagner! He's hitting, he's running, he's throwing, he's got me channeling John Denver.

I'm gone, baby. Waaaaaaaay gone.

After you get used to the season having really arrived and settled down to stay a while, baseball can be like a good dog -- at your side and ready to match whatever level of devotion you're giving that night. Want to focus with laser-beam intensity on each and every pitch? Baseball's up for that. (Chase this ball for the 254th time? I can do that!) Busy doing other stuff and so limited to occasional peeks at the TV or close listens to the radio? Baseball may not agree with your priorities, but it'll hang with you nonetheless. (I'll just lie here and snooze until I think you might be getting Doritos.)

This was one of the latter kinds of nights in my house, with the combination of a West Coast game, sleeping wife and sleeping house guest removing the TVs as viewing options and plenty of work making my attention to Howie and Wayne less than perfect. But they were back there anyway, up on the dresser behind my head, and when I'd cock an ear their way it was clear that they had a fairly nutty game to chronicle. Like couldn't anyone pitch? Would both catchers leave their position in disgust over the various cruelties being meted out to them? And how was this crackpot affair going to end, anyway?

For a while this had the look of a Mets game adhering to a rather dreadful blueprint, one we've seen and heard all too often from San Francisco: an early lead squandered, a young pitcher exposed, a wretched loss endured. (Which always comes with the added knife twist of having stayed up way too late for the privilege of being aggravated.) But somehow Bobby Parnell's crumbling was followed by an even bigger gag job by Brian Wilson, and we prevailed.

Lots of storylines in this one. Like John Maine looking like he would crumble, staggering through an ugly first and then watching two out, nobody on turn into its own ugly reflection -- two on, nobody out -- after Alex Cora turned a double-play ball into an error in the second. But Maine somehow got through that unscathed, labored into the sixth, got Emmanuel Burriss to end the inning and got two outs in the seventh besides. Like David Wright going 3-for-3 with four steals, tying Roger Cedeno's record on a night the Mets set a club record with seven swipes. (And is it fair to say that the Franchise II has played Cedenoesque ball at times recently? Vince Coleman also swiped four, but let's not connect those two Mets in any way. I won't even write their names in the same sentence.) Like Carlos Beltran stealing third again, though once again an umpire's discretion played an uncomfortably large role. By the way, between the steals and the snatches of chin music and the outcome, I wouldn't be surprised to get a Bay Area forecast for "chippy with possible squalls of rancor." (Which kind of sucks because Tim Lincecum and the Big Unit throw hard.)

There were storylines before the game as well, though they weren't the kind we like. I'm least concerned about Jose Reyes's stiff right calf, since that mild injury corresponded interestingly with Jose's stiff right cerebral hemisphere, or whatever ailment it is that's caused him to forget how to run the bases. J.J. Putz's elbow is more worrisome but not the stuff of panic, though my first, second and third instinct is to join the crowd blaming the stupid WBC for his troubles. (Did you know the WBC also gave AIG bonuses, caused me to gain five pounds and betrayed Miss California by blowing her top open during an innocent photo shoot? All true!)

And Carlos Delgado is the most worrisome news of all -- a torn hip labrum is what kept A-Rod on the shelf for nine weeks, and he only had the problem partially repaired and is a good deal younger. It hampered Mike Lowell badly. Chase Utley played through it, but ... well, he's Chase Utley. If Delgado needs surgery, that could be the year, the end of his Met tenure, and a rather uncertain patch-and-paste job with Fernando Tatis and Gary Sheffield and Alex Cora and Daniel Murphy and Nick Evans and goodness knows who else over there. Life with Delgado is certainly a roller coaster -- looking back at last Opening Day through today, this is one ride pregnant women and people with a heart condition are strongly advised to avoid, and the rest of us might want to hang onto our hats and sunglasses while strapped into.

We won, and that's great. But I wonder what we may have lost.

Random Note: You can now subscribe to Faith and Fear for the Kindle. Costs $2 a month, but ... um, it's on the Kindle? (Seriously, I don't quite get the Kindle. But if this makes someone happy, we're happy too.)

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