Was That So Hard? (Yes. Yes It Was.)

With two outs in the ninth and the Mets up by a skinny run, the Twins’ Brooks Lee slapped a ball into the hole, to the right of fill-in shortstop Bo Bichette. Bichette made a nice play to corral it, threw across his body with everything he had … but no, Lee had beaten it out.

Lee had beaten it out and was replaced at first by the annoyingly speedy James Outman. Striding to the plate to face Luke Weaver was Byron Buxton, the same Byron Buxton who’d tortured the Mets over two games with both bat and glove, and who now was perfectly placed to break hearts again in a way that felt like it might be irreparable.

“I’m too old for this,” said my soon-to-be-83-year-old mom from her post in the chair next to me.

“So am I,” said about-to-be-57-year-old me.

“Me three,” said my not-yet-23-year-old kid in distant Tacoma.

(I don’t know if that last part is true, but probably.)

Weaver, the Mets’ Shetland pony reliever, went to work on Buxton the way pitchers have gone to work on hitters for a century or so: fastballs at the top of the zone, breaking stuff below it. I was admiring Weaver’s compact motion and finding amusement in Francisco Alvarez being so amped behind the plate that he was practically vibrating. But I was also imagining Weaver leaving a fastball too low or a changeup too high and Buxton getting those lightning-fast hands in motion and 3-2 Mets becoming 4-3 Twins and Citi Field going silent as a tomb and after a last flurry of pointlessness the dreadful metronome of this 12-game losing streak ticking over to 13.

Except Weaver made a changeup dive enticingly, Buxton swung over it, and the Mets — perhaps improbably yet undeniably — had won.

No, it wasn’t easy.

There was Francisco Lindor slowing down rounding the bases, almost getting thrown out at the plate and then vanishing into the tunnel with a calf strain, which was what felled Juan Soto.

There was Mark Vientos running through Tim Leiper’s stop sign — Leiper’s helpless look was priceless — and getting thrown out at home by a margin big enough to accommodate a compact car, maybe even a midsize sedan.

There was Soto strolling off first and belatedly discovering the “walk to second” trick doesn’t work without Antoan Richardson pixie dust, as said magic powder is now the property of the Braves.

There was Buxton lurking along with various other annoyingly competent Twins, wearing applied-by-the-quart eyeblack (which a] doesn’t do anything; and b] anyway it was night) and pinstripes on the road. The former’s just silly; the latter will be a capital crime once I’m crowned Godking for Eternity.

And there was the sense of doom we could all feel lurking, the gnawing sense that hope is just disaster that hasn’t grown up yet. Twelve-game losing streaks do that to you.

But — and maybe this is just storytelling after the fact –it felt like there were other things at work too. Like Clay Holmes‘ steely performance, or Weaver stepping up when Brooks Raley looked shaky. Like the welcome sound of Soto’s bat connecting authoritatively with a baseball. Like patient ABs from Bichette and Alvarez and Brett Baty and Marcus Semien, whose approaches had been the stuff of consternation during this awful stretch.

And there was the sense that maybe said awful stretch had tired us all out to the point that we’d passed through despair and anger and venomous irony (those “MVP” chants for a baffled Austin Warren were simultaneously everything that makes me love and hate being a Mets fan) and wound up somewhere strange and new, in which we put everything else aside and simply hoped something good might happen.

Which it actually did.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring? There may well be talk of strains and MRIs. Christian Scott might remind us that getting back to the big leagues with elbow 2.0 isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. The ABs may get anxious again, the pitching may falter, the defense may turn porous.

Any number of bad things might happen. But tonight they didn’t. And tonight that feels like more than enough.