Welcome to Flashback Friday: I Saw The Decade End, a milestone-anniversary salute to the New York Mets of 1969, 1979, 1989 and 1999. Each week, we immerse ourselves in or at least touch upon something that transpired within the Metsian realm 40, 30, 20 or 10 years ago. Amazin' or not, here it comes.

Except that it shocked my teeth with its sweetness and tasted a tad fermented, I loved Amazin' Mets Frosted Flakes Cereal when it hit grocery store shelves in the early fall of 1999. I loved that when Major League Baseball and the Players Association licensed — with proceeds directed to charity — baseball player images to an outfit called Famous Fixins, we didn't see an individual Met on the box as was the case with representatives of other teams involved in similar promotions (Cal's Classic O's; Barry Bonds MVP Crunch; Derek Jeter's Suck It With Milk). Our cereal featured approximately a third of our roster. That seemed at least 33% appropriate. Those 1999 Mets were, in every sense of the phrase, a team effort.

There was Al Leiter into his windup; Rey Ordoñez in mid-balletic leap-and-throw; John Franco pumping a fist (presumably after squirming out of a bases-loaded jam); Mike Piazza sending one nine miles; Edgardo Alfonzo guessing curve; Robin Ventura poised to pounce on a bunt; Rickey Henderson rounding third and heading for home; and John Olerud, hard hat and mitt ready for anything.

A sweet cereal for a sweet season. I could eat those '99 Mets with a spoon.

Everybody should have been snapping up boxes of Amazin' Mets Frosted Flakes Cereal. The front announced "ONLY 250,000 PRINTED," but they would have made more had the demand been overwhelming. I did my part. I bought box after box. Gave 'em out as Christmas presents. Saved at least one unopened, buried somewhere in a closet a few feet from where I type. I'm hoping it doesn't contain ten-year-old bugs by now.

I thought about Amazin' Mets Frosted Flakes Cereal in the wake of my co-blogger's Tuesday assertion that it's all right not just that our opponents this weekend continue to exist but that on some level it's OK that they flourish.

...we don't entirely mind sharing our city with that baseball colossus up in the Bronx, the one that soaks up sportswriter attention and back pages and free-agent dollars and the loyalties of the soulless and the misguided.

He said I disagree with his assertion. He is correct.

I get Jason's longstanding point, that it's helpful to have an automatic safety valve to siphon off the a-holes who gravitate to the A-Rods, thus keeping them from gumming up the works for the rest of us. I get it and I respect where it's coming from. But I don't quite buy it, not the way I once bought boxes of Amazin' Mets Frosted Flakes Cereal.

The other night, as we were settling into our temporary Excelsior Caesars lifestyle, we bandied about the pros and cons of this new ballpark of ours that has become, in head-spinning time, a familiar presence in our lives and certainly a constant in mine. I'm still grappling with the size issue, the alleged intimacy of Citi vs. the sweeping grandeur of Shea (though that could also be framed as the human scale of Citi vs. the hulkingness of Shea). One of the side notes that saddens me about Citi Field's truncated capacity, I said, is that the Mets will never again do what they did six times at Shea Stadium, including last year: they will never again lead the National League in home attendance.

"Really?" my co-blogger asked in that genuinely incredulous tone I elicit from him about three times per season. When I affirmed yes, of course, he wondered what prize we earned for that particular feat of ticket-selling.

None that was tangible, obviously, but I liked it. I liked the sense that "everybody" was on the same page I was, that "everybody" wanted to go where I wanted to go, that "everybody" was into what I was into. I don't particularly enjoy the sensation, as some do, of being intensely devoted to something that attracts the attention of relatively few. I won't not like what I like because it's unpopular, but liking what's unpopular doesn't necessarily make me feel cooler or hipper or smarter than all those I could write off as lemmings. Frankly, it makes me feel lonely. I never craved Mets fandom for popularity by association's sake, not even when they were the most popular team around. But I won't say I didn't find the phenomenon gratifying.

Besides, if our team is that popular, it means they're doing something right.

When the Mets ascended to the heights in 1969, revisited them in 1973 and swatted airplanes from them in '86 and '88, there was no loneliness to being a Mets fan. "Everybody" seemed to be a Mets fan. Did that include some who were not necessarily pure of heart or less than grating? Absolutely. But shoot, you get that at Mets games no matter how they're doing. It may not be considered frontrunning or bandwagon-jumping when the Mets aren't sprinting or rolling, but encountering individuals you consider less than ideal company is part of the human condition. Did we encounter a greater proportion of them during the years when the Mets were, by consensus, the most successful baseball show in town? To be honest, I couldn't say. I was too busy enjoying the Mets and all the hoopla surrounding their success.

We are owed another of those periods, let the soulless and misguided land where they may. We're overdue for delivery. By 1999, all of New York should have been dining out on Amazin' Mets Frosted Flakes Cereal. It shouldn't have been a cult breakfast. That season and that team deserved to take a back seat to nobody in public perception. That team should have owned its city. It was all it could do to sublet. Perhaps if the Mets had staved off sogginess against Atlanta in Game Six, sliced the Braves like bananas in Game Seven and then gone to a postseason Subway Series and prevailed, that would have taken care of business.

But that's results. That's after the fact. We won it all in '69 and '86, we didn't quite in '73 and '88. But we were It in all four years and the seasons that surrounded them. The Mets go to the trouble of truly contending, it is my contention that they deserve the spoils attendant a top-notch team in a great, big city. We began a long journey upward in 1997 in virtual privacy. I adored 1997, but it bothered me that we were a sidebar instead of the back page. We got to '99 and made it past September and I somehow expected it to be bigger news — 55,000-seat huge as opposed to 42,000-seat moderate. And it would have been, I'm convinced, if there hadn't been that other thing that raced ahead of us to local prominence in the mid-'90s and had the gall to stay there clear to the end of the decade when it should have been our time. They've never quite vacated the stage since, either.

No, I don't think that's a good thing because I know that it's a far, far better thing when the Mets are New York's unquestioned baseball colossus. We handle it just fine. It was my experience the last time around that the town is happiest when the Mets are its toast (as opposed to the Mets being toast and inspiring absolutely no cereal). Yeah, you'll get some intrusive dunderheads who don't belong trying to hitch a ride, but mostly you'll stoke people's better angels. When the Mets are It, New Yorkers worry for them and care for them in the earnest hope that they will revel in them. The process doesn't much resemble the mind-numbing Number Oneism of self-satisfied jerks getting off on being self-satisfied jerks, the behavior commonly linked to followers of other top-notch baseball teams in New York more recently (though not all that recently, given the paucity of top-notch baseball teams locally of late). My evidence, not unlike the contents of my unopened box of Amazin' Mets Frosted Flakes Cereal, may be a little stale, but I'd be willing to corroborate my theory anew by observing much Met winning and commensurate amounts of Yankee losing. We can start tonight.

You wouldn't notice the soulless. You wouldn't notice the misguided. You would just notice how good you felt every day as long as it lasted. And you wouldn't want it to end.

In the meantime, you shouldn't wait to begin reading Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

When you get a ticket plan, the tickets from later in the schedule seem like the stuff of science fiction: Amid the chill of February, who can imagine June 25, 2009? For all we knew back then, we might spend the evening mourning Michael Jackson, waiting for the latest news out of Iran and making merciless fun of the governor of South Carolina.

This was a day game on Emily's plan with her dad -- a pair of tickets that threatened to go orphaned. Joshua's out of school and not yet in camp. I have some vacation time unallocated. Really, the answer was obvious: a father-and-son outing to Citi Field, with the added bonus that for today at least, summer actually came to New York City.

Last time Joshua and I did this, Willie Harris wound up robbing Carlos Delgado and my son gave me a lesson in innocence and resilience that I vaguely begrudged at the time but soon came to cherish. Unsurprisingly, he's grown considerably as a baseball fan: Nowadays we banter about why batting average is a lousy stat (if Luis Castillo goes 5-for-10 with five bases-empty singles and Omir Santos goes 5-for-10 with five grand slams, who has the higher batting average? Who's been more valuable?), talk over why Ryan Church puts his hands up like he's making a catch even when he knows he's playing the ball on one hop, discuss why the infield-fly rule exists and why a bunted third strike isn't just another foul. He's learned to loathe Derek Jeter (though my blood ran cold the other night when he inquired if we shouldn't drop by His Smugness's Web site, since we hadn't been there lately) and I've got him started on disliking Tony La Russa and Cody Ross. (I don't know why I hate Cody Ross with the intensity of a thousand suns, but I do.) And he's been introduced to the family tics and quirks -- he greets each opposing pitcher with "Bring on [Name Here]," yelps "We win!" if the Met starting pitcher's first pitch is a strike, counts down outs to go to a no-hitter by three after each inning, and sighs heavily and groans, "Another night..." when the no-hitter is inevitably lost. And, it goes without saying, he grasps the essential difference between taking three out of four from the Cardinals and being able to mock Tony La Russa for being the fussy, self-satisfied martinet he is and splitting with the Cardinals and being irritated for the next 27 hours.

Everything was perfect as we plopped ourselves in the Promenade high behind home plate, except for one thing: Johan Santana was quite obviously not himself. Sure, there was a pitcher wearing 57 down there, and he was stalking around behind the mound like Santana, but the pitches were doing disturbingly un-Santanan things, like swooping and rising and dipping where they weren't supposed to. 3-0 kept following 2-0 and 1-0, with uh-oh dogging their heels the whole way, as Johan seethed and steamed and tried to force his arm to obey his brain.

Watching a Cooperstown-caliber pitcher at the top of his game is wonderful, of course -- who wouldn't want a seat in the studio as Michaelangelo made a chunk of rock immortal? -- but sometimes watching a master craftsman struggle is more interesting. Santana looked at video after the first (it either didn't help or more likely these things take a while), gathered himself to get Albert Pujols with the young game in the balance in the second, caught Skip Schumaker looking to end the fourth, and took care of Brendan Ryan personally on a comebacker to finish the sixth. It wasn't a great performance -- that one earned run over seven is deceptive -- but that's not the point. It was enough to win on a day when a lot of pitchers would have been gone in the fourth with a shrug of the shoulders and a swollen ERA. And that's the difference -- OK, really it's a difference -- between Santana and a lot of other pitchers.

It was also an object lesson that baseball is fundamentally unfair. Consider Chris Carpenter's fourth: He surrendered Luis Castillo's modest single in the hole, a David Wright double-play ball that Carpenter himself deflected into an infield hit, a Fernando Tatis parachute in front of Ryan Ludwick, and then Nick Evans' two-run double on a cutter that didn't do much. Santana struggled for about an hour; Carpenter pitched badly for three seconds at most. Yet Johan got the W and Carpenter got the L.

And of course there was the tense endgame, with Frankie Rodriguez disposing of Chris Duncan and Schumaker so the main event could ensue: K-Rod vs. El Hombre, insurance canceled for the bout. (Like all of us, I'd started doing worried lineup math late in the seventh.) Frankie sent Pujols to first, but that proved habit-forming: Ludwick followed him and there stood Yadier Fucking Molina, and I looked into the helmet cup of vanilla ice cream that I was viciously stirring, half-expecting to see that the sprinkles had formed themselves into the face of Aaron Heilman.

Happily, all I saw was ice cream -- and YFM's line drive soon saw nothing but the confines of Jeremy Reed's mitt. Cora's Irregulars had not just survived but prospered -- and can take over first place Friday night, against the Yankees no less. It's an amazing game, baseball. It'll delight you and horrify you and be a loyal companion and a vicious tormentor, and every time you think you know the script you're proved wrong. You can spend your whole life watching and learning baseball, but you will never, ever figure it out. And thank goodness for that.

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