The never-say-die Mets didn't say die until the ninth in the afternoon portion of Sunday's quasi-doubleheader. But their offense failed to come to life in any tangible way until the eighth, so the late-inning heroics effect that proved so popular the day before was kind of dimmed and doomed ahead of time.

It really pays to score four in the first and take your chances from there.

Gosh, Saturday's game was so much fun, making it that much more of a shame that we had to trudge back to our usual humdrum lives so soon again. What, Angel Pagan couldn't have kept the ninth-inning rally going for the power-hitting Anderson Hernandez, he who has the distinction of bopping the Mets' 6,000th home run? (That's 6,000 in franchise history, not in one game — that, as they used to say on Sportscenter, would be a record.) If Hernandez had continued it, how about an encore for David Wright? And what about that bit wherein if a frog had wings he wouldn't bump his ass when he hops?

Yeah, just getting carried away with the ifs here. I tell ya, though, it's been a while since I indulged ifs of the hypothetically hopeful variety. The most ifs I've allowed myself lately have been in the service of ruefully wondering, “If they'd just let the Mets play last 20 games as 180 consecutive innings, could we be done with this season any sooner?” Before Saturday, my patience for Team Unwatchable had completely run out. I watched the unwatchable Mets, but not all that closely. This was no longer the baseball 1962 Mets hitting coach Rogers Hornsby and I stared out the window all winter and waited for. This was just cruel.

M-E-T-S…Must End This Season.

Then came Saturday and all its candy-coated treats. Not just the win in comeback fashion over the Hated Rivals, but the way it was done: David Wright matching his career high in RBI; Fernando Tatis racking up four hits for the first time in ten years; Carlos Beltran resuming his All-Star ways (tell me again how injured players should just pack it in); the chronically ordinary Santos and Murphy contributing to a crucial pre-ninth run that will get lost in the retelling…

Oh, there will be retelling. There will have to be, by our little band of griots. Few will remember this game down the road. You and I, we'll remember it, but that's because we are all sick in the head Metswise. We watch the unwatchable until our patience is stretched as thin as Wilson Valdez. But mass attention was long ago diverted from this Mets team, and not without good reason. Still, you get some fine moments from not so fine Mets teams at junctures like these.

Some get remembered more than others. Perhaps because it slipped into the larger narrative of spoiling the Cubs' Wild Card aspirations, relatively many in our tribe seem to remember the Victor Diaz/Craig Brazell Game from September 25, 2004 (which I find amusing since I couldn't find anybody to take an extra ticket from me that sunny Saturday afternoon). There seems to be general if ever more vague recollection of the Carl Everett Game from September 13, 1997, a much better year but one almost worn down to its nub by the time its most miraculous episode unspooled. Those were games, tied on dramatic two-out ninth-inning homers and won in extras on emphatic long balls — not Lenny Dykstra- or Todd Pratt-caliber situations, but transcendently awesome enough to merit second-tier recall among Metsopotamians of good standing.

But does anybody besides me and my friend Joe, maybe because we were there, remember the Esix Snead Game of September 21, 2002? Does anybody besides me and me alone remember the dizzying spectacle of the Mets beating the Giants 11-9 in San Francisco across twelve stunning innings on August 21, 2004? Or (if I may go way the hell back) the way Joel Youngblood channeled Steve Henderson for a tenth-inning 5-4 win over the Pirates on September 29, 1980?

These were great, great, great games that got no, no, no attention in the pre-blog era. They came when almost nobody was looking, when the Mets were deemed unworthy of coverage or anybody's time. All of 1,787 paid their way into Shea to watch Youngblood swat a two-run homer off Grant Jackson in the bottom of the tenth to rescue Jeff Reardon who had given up the go-ahead run in the top of the tenth. I listened on WMCA, after school, as my mother insisted on my standing still so she could hem some new pair of pants she bought me. I didn't care about pants. I cared about Mets. I may have been one of only 1,787 listening at that point, but I heard every bit of it and I did not stand still.

This is why seasons that fall well short of desired outcome must not, despite my recurring 2009 dismay, end any sooner than they have to. Sometimes amid the muck and mire of Met dregs you get an Esix Snead Game — an Andres Galarraga error brings the tying run home in the ninth, Snead blasts a two-out, three-run walkoff homer in the eleventh — or an afternoon like the one in Phone Company Park five years ago that I still so adore. August 21, 2004 should be a cult classic:

• Bonds on six times without benefit of an intentional walk;

• Wright 4-for-6, three runs scored;

• Floyd drives a homer into the Cove;

• Looper throws three gut-covered innings;

• Zeile skies one into a blinding sun that Dustan Mohr can't handle for the eventual winning runs;

• Jeff Keppinger reaches base for the first time, Wilson Delgado collects three hits and Bartolome Fortunato earns the only save of his big league career.

It was one of those games after which I e-mailed everybody I knew to discover almost none of them had bothered to watch. Pity. The Mets do some of their best work under cover of futility.

That's what they did Saturday when they blew a 4-0 lead and stormed back from an 8-4 deficit to win 10-9 while the “big stories” in sports unfolded on diamonds, gridirons and tennis courts elsewhere. It's not what happened Sunday when they fell down 4-0 and lost 5-4. Nevertheless, John Maine pitched three more innings than we thought we'd see out of him in 2009. Hernandez launched that shocking shot to center (shocking for Citizens Bank even). Josh Thole recorded four hits and Jeff Francoeur strung together three more. Others might take those as signs of encouragement for 2010 (except for Francoeur, whose continued playing and producing in spite of a bad thumb is easily dismissed because he doesn't walk much, so stop enjoying watching him hustle and smile, you unsophisticated ninny). Honestly, I've watched too many Septembers to take anything from them as evidence of what to expect in the years that follow. I'm not all that keen on expectations anymore on the whole. Go find me the season preview that predicted how injured and inept the Mets would become and then I'll put credence in long-term projections.

But at least until Sunday night writes a new storyline, I will appreciate Sunday afternoon's handful of highlights for what they are: a few guys on my baseball team doing well and making me happy for instances all too fleeting as my baseball team's presence on our communal stage dwindles daily. That's about the most I can ask out of September when I absolutely can't ask any more.

Come to Two Boots Tavern on the Lower East Side when we convene our final AMAZIN' TUESDAY of the season — September 15 at 7:00 PM. Jon Springer of Mets By The Numbers and I welcome special guests The Bad Guys Won author Jeff Pearlman and Metstradamus mastermind John Coppinger. There will be great pizza, cold beer (the first of which is free if you bring Two Boots owner Phil Hartman a Mets baseball card) and more Met bonhomie than you thought could possibly be scraped together at the end of a year like this.

In Mets-Phillies lore, you win the Damn Thing when you go to Philadelphia, you build a huge lead, you hold on for dear life and you come away thanking your lucky 10-9 stars that you didn’t blow the Damn Thing. It was the formula for broacast immortality on July 25, 1990 and it echoed clear through to July 7, 2008.

Mets 10
Phillies 9

It remains the official score of sweet relief, no matter what route the Mets take to arrive there.

This Saturday afternoon in South Philly, it wasn’t Mets 10 Phillies 3 as it was nineteen years ago when Bob Murphy and Mario Diaz teamed to hold off unfathomable disaster. And it wasn’t Mets 10 Phillies 1 as it was last year when Pedro Martinez, Tony Armas and Aaron Heilman couldn’t stand prosperity and Billy Wagner could barely handle it. Those were 10-9 wins whose last chapters were written by Terry McMillan, when we found ourselves crossing our fingers, clutching our totems, beseeching our deities and waiting to exhale.

This Saturday afternoon in South Philly was different…but similar enough.

We needed to win 10-9 in 1990 to move within a half-game of first-place Pittsburgh. We needed to win 10-9 in 2008 to pull within 2½ of the Phillies. We also needed to not lose those games, too, because to surrender leads of six and eight runs, respectively, is to tell the baseball gods, “No, no thanks. We’re not interested in succeeding this or any other season.” You lead 10-3 or you lead 10-1, you have one job: you win. You win because you lead by a lot and you win because you rarely lead by that much. It’s one of those “in the course of a season, there’s a third you win” games — you don’t toss those back lightly.

Nor, come to think of it, do you charge out of the gate with five hits, four runs and stick the whole package in a Hefty Bag as precursor to kicking it to the curb. That, however, is what the Mets did today. They disrespected elderly Jamie Moyer by slapping the cane from his left hand and making off with his Social Security check. Young whippersnappers nearly got away with it, too, but don’t mess with the Gray Panther because he carries mace to the mound and, before we knew it, he had subdued those smart-alecky Mets with fifteen consecutive outs.

Well, that’ll happen. The Mets blitzed Jim Rooker with six consecutive hits to score four runs in the first at Shea in 1979 and then stopped scoring altogether. That was all right, because Pete Falcone subdued the Pirates that night and we won 4-0.

I never thought I’d say this in an unflattering context, but Mike Pelfrey is no Pete Falcone.

Pelf couldn’t gift-wrap runs to the Phillies fast enough. Citizens Bank Park, as we know, was built on an abandoned air hockey table, so balls do tend to fly out of there. But did Mike really need to act as air traffic controller and guide them to their destination? Feliz, you’re clear for takeoff…Utley, use the right-center runaway…Ibañez, there are some clouds with your name on them…

Moyer settling down, Pelfrey coughing it up. That would seem to be a 2009-style script, wouldn’t it? The Phillies turned that 4-0 deficit into an 6-4 lead by the time Moyer got around to permitting another baserunner. It was 8-4 not long after that.

Yup, this was Pelfrey. These were the Mets. This is 2009. Sigh… Not the exhaling we’d want to do. So what if Beltran homered earlier? So what if Wright had driven in two right before that? So what if Wilson Valdez managed to get Daniel Murphy in on a fielder’s choice in the seventh? It was 8-5. Big whoop. And here comes Ken Takahashi to whoop it up even more, allowing a double to Utley and an RBI single to Ibañez to make it 9-5 in the bottom of the seventh. Takahashi exits, Sean Green, master of the Citizens Bank bases-loaded walk, enters. What’s going to go wrong now?

Surprisingly, nothing, at least not for us. Jamie Moyer, realizing it was now or never for the early bird special, exited and gave way to that paragon of humanity Brett Myers. On Fox, Tim McCarver and Howie Rose (how strange to type that combo) were framing Myers as some sort of secret weapon for Charlie Manuel heading to the postseason given the Phillies’ continued case of bullpen hiccups. Oh, he was a secret weapon for Manuel all right, except for the other Manuel in the other dugout. A double to Tatis, a homer to Wright — Phillies 9 Mets 7 — a single to Beltran, and off Myers goes, presumably to counseling.

In comes Chan Ho Park, who still owes the Mets the money he stole from them on April 30, 2007. Park wants to settle out of court. We’ll take restitution in a pair of two-out base hits, one from Santos, another from Murphy to make it Phillies 9 Mets 8.

Hey, is this really happening? Are we really within a run after not answering eight consecutive scores by the Hated Rivals? Pelfrey’s gone (6 IP 10 H 8 ER — he’s way gone), Moyer’s gone, Takahashi’s gone even. Everything that wasn’t working for us is no longer a factor. This is the definition of a Whole New Ballgame.

Except that Sean Green is still pitching in Philadelphia, which can’t possibly be good. True, he gets two quick outs in the eighth, but two is not all Green needs. Green needs a third. That doesn’t seem to be his thing. Sure enough, a walk to Rollins. Then a wild pitch. Then a walk to Victorino. Christ, it’s Sean Green vs. the Phillies. It’s the Mets’ bullpen vs. the Phillies. It’s Mets karma vs. the Phillies. It’s that fucking game from two years ago (I’m thinking of the 11-10 debacle, but I could be referring to any of about fifty). It’s that fucking game with the triple play from last month. It’s not going to be good, is it?

Oh wait, we have one bullet in our chamber. We have Pedro Feliciano, whose entire purpose is to retire Phillie lefties. Chase Utley is one of those, so Jerry Manuel replaces Green with Pedro and…oh, great. He walked Utley. Well, coulda been worse. He could have not walked Utley and all that implies. So it’s bases loaded, and it’s two out and it’s one of the most dangerous hitters in the world, Ryan Howard, coming to bat.

Which is fine, because Pedro Feliciano lives to strike out Ryan Howard. Which he does.

Now it gets a little hazy because I’m out running errands. I left the house after Cory Sullivan didn’t tie the game in the top of the eighth, partly because errands needed running, mostly out of conviction that if I sat here and depended upon a miracle, I’d be left staring at no such thing. If I go out and don’t watch and don’t listen, I reasoned, maybe I’ll miss something worth missing.

Nice to know at the tail-end of a miserable season I’m still capable of instinctively thinking in those terms.

Thus, I followed the Green-Feliciano untangling on my squinty Palm Centro while standing in line at Pathmark. I picked up the play-by-play in the car with two out and none on in the top of the ninth. It’s all up to Tatis, Wayne Hagin said. Tatis seems to have done something well, lashing a single to right, but even that is fairly unsatisfactory, according to Hagin, because Fernando should really be on second. All the bounces, he notes, are going the Phillies’ way.

But Fernando Tatis is on first. There are two outs. David Wright is coming up. And I’m parked in front of the house with bundles to remove from the trunk. If I sit here and listen, David will probably…

I turn off the radio, get out of the car, gather up my bundles, fumble with various doors, get in and out of the elevator, work my keys, enter the living room and see the game is on. Beltran is batting. The baserunner diagram is empty. Damn, I think, Wright didn’t get on.

Then I rewind my thought process.

Hold on…if Beltran is up and there’s nobody on base…it says there are two out…and Beltran is definitely batting after Wright…it says 10-9…wait, the 10 is on top of the 9 and the Mets are the visiting team, which means…

“HEY! DAVID MUST HAVE HIT A TWO-RUN HOMER!”

Yes, I figured it out. Somewhere between getting out of the car and coming into the house, David Wright blasted a two-run home run off Ryan Madson and now we were winning in the ninth. In a matter of minutes, Frankie Rodriguez, albeit with less relish than his bobblegänger would indicate, retires the Phillies 1-2-3 to end it most happily.

For one day, the 2009 Mets got their heads out of their collective morass. For one day, the 2009 Mets reversed their Pelf-inflicted wounds and self-inflicted embarrassment. For one day, the 2009 Mets rose up and punched that arrogant foreman at the plant square on his fat nose, kicking him square in the nuts on the way up. For one day, the 2009 Mets didn’t lose.

The Mets won the Damn Thing 10-9. They didn’t take the classic route to arrive at that most sacred score, but the relief feels as sweet as ever.

Help us keep this damn winning feeling alive at Two Boots Tavern on the Lower East Side when we convene our final AMAZIN’ TUESDAY of the season — September 15 at 7:00 PM. Jon Springer of Mets By The Numbers and I welcome special guests The Bad Guys Won author Jeff Pearlman and Metstradamus mastermind John Coppinger. There will be great pizza, cold beer (the first of which is free if you bring Two Boots owner Phil Hartman a Mets baseball card) and more Met bonhomie than you thought could possibly be scraped together at the end of a year like this. It’s sort of like beating the Phillies in the ninth, except with words.

It's a measure of how far we've fallen (with farther to go) that I switched off the TV feeling that the Mets had eked out something akin to a moral victory by only allowing the Phillies to beat them by two runs. Nelson Figueroa bit and scratched and came out of things only vaguely mussed, Ken Takahashi conducted himself well and our Triple-A lineup was gallant in tilting at a few windmills before its predictable unhorsing.

Now that it's over, though, it's just another loss on the march to 90 and beyond. And I find myself shaking my head over the season as a whole yet again. This time it's not the injuries, or the incompetence, or the off-field embarrassments, though there have been plenty of all three. Rather, it's that the Mets will go into the offseason having learned almost nothing about key players for 2010, and burdened with worries about players they thought they didn't need to worry about.

A baseball plague year generally at least teaches you things, but the Mets haven't even gotten that. Fernando Nieve looked briefly intriguing and then was lost for the year. Fernando Martinez looked overmatched, but a season-ending injury left us unable to find out more about him. Jon Niese arrived for a dozen-start audition and promptly departed for the 60-day DL. The only player left who might be profitably scrutinized for 2010 is Nick Evans, but he isn't playing for some reason Jerry Manuel hasn't seen fit to share with the world. (Are there really still things to learn about Fernando Tatis?)

Daniel Murphy has shown conclusively that he can't field well enough to play left. One cringes at imagining him playing second, for fear of conjuring the petulant, stone-gloved specter of Gregg Jefferies. He looks adequate at first, but there are serious questions about whether he can hit enough to play there. If the Mets acquire a bona fide slugger to play left, they could conceivably survive with Murphy's bat at first. (Or, better yet, platoon Murphy and Evans.) But will they do that?

Angel Pagan has shown he can hit, but too many of his starts leave you wondering if he can think. Here, the dilemma is the inverse of Murphy's — the Mets might be OK with Pagan in left if they get a big bopper to play first, but will they do that?

Jeff Francoeur can get on base by swinging a bat at a baseball, and if you could bottle his attitude you'd gladly dispense it to your entire team. But he seems congenitally incapable of understanding the importance of getting on base in other ways, and his defensive reputation seems mostly based on a howitzer arm. The '09 Mets have a lot of players like Francoeur — gritty, likeable guys whom you suspect will never play baseball well enough to be effective everyday players.

Meanwhile, every single guy the Mets had stopped worrying about has given them reason to worry again.

David Wright's power has vanished, his defense has eroded, his strikeouts have soared, and he routinely turns in terrible at-bats. Is he concealing a nagging injury, or has his career taken an ominous downturn?

Fairly or not, Jose Reyes will play 2010 nagged by questions about his durability and his mental toughness.

Carlos Beltran will play with all eyes on the condition of his knee — and on whether the Mets doctors can be trusted to take care of that knee.

John Maine will enter 2010 having seen two consecutive seasons derailed by shoulder woes.

Mike Pelfrey may not be having nearly as bad a year as we all think (I found this Howard Megdal analysis fascinating), but he seems to think he's had a pretty awful one. And who says he'll have a good defense behind him next year?

For Oliver Perez to return to being a giant, expensive question mark would be miraculous progress.

And while we all want to bask in the radiance of JHN every fifth day, he did just have elbow surgery.

Where we had certainty, we now have uncertainty. Where we had uncertainty, we now have more uncertainty. Turning the calendar to 2010 will erase the Mets' immediate, day-to-day problems. But the larger problem? It's not going away any time soon.

Here's something certain: Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets is a fine and loyal baseball companion. Find out from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or pick it up at a fine area bookstore. The discussion continues on Facebook.

Come on down to Two Boots Tavern on the Lower East Side for our final AMAZIN' TUESDAY of the season — September 15 at 7:00 PM. Greg will be joined by co-host Jon Springer of Mets By The Numbers as we welcome special guests The Bad Guys Won author Jeff Pearlman and Metstradamus mastermind John Coppinger. And if THAT'S not enough, there will be great pizza, cold beer (the first of which is free if you bring Two Boots owner Phil Hartman a Mets baseball card) and more Met bonhomie than you thought could possibly be scraped together at the end of a year like this. The Mets-Braves game will be on, too, but don't let that detract from the experience. Seriously, we've had three of these events and every one of them has been a blast, so come on down and have a great Mets time with us.

Yesterday fans who came to Citi Field got a free hot dog and the chance to watch the Marlins beat the sluggish Mets. But hey, it was a nice night.

Tonight it was cold with periodic spurts of rain. The Mets, meanwhile, meekly absorbed a horrific ass-beating, marked by more bases-loaded walks, dimwitted baserunning, grounders not corralled, double plays hit into and double plays not turned. The Mets have been in free fall for some time, but amazingly, they have yet to reach terminal velocity. Though it defies all the laws of probability, they are actually managing to play worse and become even harder to watch.

Anyway, it's probably best that there was no giveaway. Given all of the above, what possible freebie would have been sufficient inducement to justify a trip out to Flushing tonight? A complimentary Shackburger, shake and fries? Piggyback rides for all from Mr. Met? The Pepsi Party Patrol hurling actual game-used bases navigated ineptly by Angel Pagan? Gold ingots for the first 25,000 fans? A Rey Sanchez edition Bentley given away each inning?

And yet there they were — fans. Ten thousand or so at least, cheering bravely for baseball played about as carelessly and stupidly as it can be.

From the relative comfort of my bed, I watched them and tried to think of a possible explanation for that many people not being able to find something — anything — better to do on a Thursday night in New York City.

Perhaps they were Marlins fans, who find near-empty stadiums comforting. (Joke stolen from Greg Prince.)

Perhaps Tobi Stoner — 2009's 53rd Met — has lots and lots of friends and family.

And then I realized that while I wasn't at the game, I was continuing to watch it, even though Marlins kept scoring and Mets kept falling over things. Surely I had something better to do, but there I sat, fuming at Angel Pagan and hoping Nick Evans might get a hit. If I'd had a ticket, would I have been out there bundled up and cheering for the Mets to draw within eight in the ninth? Good Lord, I probably would have been there. Oh, of course I would have been there.

No, there wasn't anything wrong with those people. They were just Mets fans, showing up even in the spastic dying days of an ungodly season, hoping over-the-hill veterans and undercooked rookies might give them something to clap for. Which, after all, was what I was doing too.

Come to think of it, there is something wrong with us. We're sick in the head, is what we are. Pathetic and delusional. But you know what? Fuck it. We're sick in the head together. And when karma turns — in 2010 or 2012 or 2020 or whenever — the shared insanity will be sweet indeed.

Need therapy? Seek it at AMAZIN' TUESDAY, the final 2009 edition of which is coming to Two Boots Tavern on the Lower East Side, 7:00 P.M., September 15. Please join us and Mets By The Numbers' Jon Springer as we welcome our special guests The Bad Guys Won author Jeff Pearlman and Metstradamus mastermind John Coppinger. There'll be great pizza, cold beer, loads of baseball talk…and a Mets game from Turner Field that will probably make you want to blind yourself.

We're way out of the race. We're about to be officially eliminated. We're going to finish with a losing record. We're depressed. We're dispirited. We're done.

Yet Nate the profane Pirates fan could not possibly be moved by our plight.

I don't know jack about Nate except for what he posted in this space in response to a Faith and Fear rant on the Mets' unfathomable descent into disaster during the final week of 2007. The Mets had just lost their third consecutive game to the Washington Nationals, their ninth of thirteen overall, and were in the midst of tumbling from a seemingly sturdy perch above the National League East into the historical abyss of baseball ignominy.

Perhaps you remember the Mets doing that.

Anyway, Jason had posted his disgust and frustration — you could call it disgustration — with the 2007 Mets, a perfectly legitimate fistful of gripes given how our boys had given away their lead while professing little bother about their impending failure. It is safe to say, judging from the tone of Mets fan comments on that post and every post that week, we all felt essentially the same way.

Into our den of Met disgustration stumbled Nate the profane Pirates fan with his own equally legitimate perspective:

Waaah, waaah, the Mets have only won 87 games this year. They're one of the best teams in baseball and still in the pennant race, and yet they may not win! And even if they don't, we'll still maintain this fantastic team next year! Oh, woe is me!

Fuck you. I saw this post on Deadspin, and shut the fuck up. You take having a great team for granted. I'm a Pirates fan…I've seen 15 years of horrendous teams and losing seasons. We've had one year where we were relevant in the pennant race and they STILL finished with a losing record. You don't know how good you have it.

Then, because Nate was nothing if not thorough, he added a second comment:

Oh, by the way, you're welcome for Oliver Perez.

Jason tried to talk Nate down by lifting him up with some words of encouragement for recent signs of life at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela. He tried to relate to him by invoking Sid Bream sliding under the tag of Mike LaValliere in the heartstopping final instant of the 1992 NLCS, the last time Pittsburgh's baseball team saw the middle of October. He tried. I doubt he succeeded.

We never heard from Nate again, but I've thought of him now and then since his drive-by tirade. I've thought of him and his kind — Pittsburgh Pirates fans — as our current season has come to resemble what is, sadly for them, their typical season.

Is the Pirate plight as played out across almost two decades worse than the kind of apocalyptic episode to which we've been party the previous two Septembers? Certainly every one of us would love to have the Marlins come in with everything on the line for us and take our chances on another debacle instead of what we've got now, which is nothing at all. It's what we live for as fans. We want our September to pulsate. We want our stadium to pulsate. We don't want our souls to be crushed, but we do want our souls in play.

The Pittsburgh Pirates have received an unusual amount of attention this September as everyone seems to have noticed at once that they lost their 82nd game of the season. Not a big story most seasons. The Pirates losing an 82nd game is the baseball equivalent of a rooster crowing at a sunrise. It's a routine occurrence. It's not news. It's just what happens to those Buccos.

This September, however, it was monumental, for this is the seventeenth consecutive season in which the Pirates have guaranteed themselves a losing record — one more than any franchise has ever endured (1933-48 Phillies, you can rest in peace). Not seventeen years without a world championship or a pennant or a playoff appearance. Seventeen years without once experiencing more W's than L's.

That's depressing. That's dispiriting. That's doom.

To fully comprehend, imagine our lost season of 2009 is repeated in some form or fashion next year. Then the year after that. Then the year after that. And so on, clear out to 2025. Take your age this September and add sixteen years to it (knocking wood we all live that long). You'd be standing there at Now + 16 thinking:

1) Ohmigod, I haven't seen the Mets have a winning season in seventeen years, since 2008, since they played in Shea Stadium, since I was so upset they blew their chance at the playoffs on the final day of the season.

2) Ohmigod, I've spent the past seventeen years rooting for a horrible baseball team that has never gotten any better and gives me no tangible reason to believe they ever will.

3) Ohmigod, I'm seventeen years older than I was the last time the Mets were any good.

You can have the next sixteen years of your life back now (I'm in no rush to turn 62 that fast myself). But you can wonder how you as a Mets fan, who has certainly absorbed your share of downs, would deal with having absolutely no ups for a veritable eternity. Not a Wild Card, not a division title, not a hint of a race for anything but the sweet mercy of Closing Day. Would you still be a Mets fan if well after three, five, seven, nine years you'd watched rebuilding programs crumble, phenoms flame out, budding stars blossom for other teams and all your rivals progress at some point while your club goes only backwards?

It's not a question for which I'd ever want to discover an answer. Seven straight losing seasons from 1977 through 1983 were bad enough. Six straight losing seasons from 1991 through 1996 were bad enough. Three straight losing seasons of the particularly embarrassing kind were bad enough from 2002 through 2004. And yes, this thing we call 2009 continues to stink on ice. Every one of these losing seasons has been hell.

If you add them up and string them together, you have seventeen losing seasons in a row. Seventeen awful losing seasons in a row, though I suppose that might be redundant. While I've occasionally derived a bit of fleeting and even lingering happiness from a couple of losing seasons, they're still awful. They can't help but be.

That's life as a Pirates fan. Our September now is their September always, at least dating back to 1993. If Pirates fans go to their brilliant little ballpark the last month of the season, they go with nothing to anticipate in the way of meaningful games. They go with nothing to play for, nothing to root for except what they invent in their minds. Maybe they can get behind a rookie who they think will turn things around eventually. Maybe there's a milestone nobody outside of their section at PNC knows or cares about. Maybe it's just the hope that their team will lose 89 games instead of 90, 94 games instead of 95, 99 games instead of a hundred. Maybe they can take simple pleasure in the beauty and joy of baseball, though after the first sixteen losing seasons, I imagine the beauty and the joy are pretty well obscured, the mind games cause headaches and that even charming PNC Park isn't much to look at.

Teams' fortunes change over time. Consider that the Rays were born dead on arrival and resisted resuscitation from there; the Brewers wallowed in stale Meister Bräu for ages; the Tigers' roar was long reduced to a whimper. But they each shook off their lousiness in the last few years and rewarded their fans with a trip to the postseason. The Reds are about as perennially punchless as the Pirates, but they went to a Wild Card play-in game (heh-heh) in 1999 and won 85 games in 2000. The Royals have been royally screwed since the 1994 players strike, but they managed to sneak a winning season into their stew of perpetual futility in 2003. The Orioles are subpar regularly, but they were a division champion in 1997. The Nationals finished 2005 at .500 if you can believe that. Hell, the Expos, who no longer exist, finished 2003 over .500, and that was with home games divided among Montreal, San Juan and absolute purgatory.

Everybody's gotten a little something out of life since 1993. We've been in the playoffs three times and contended for the same a bunch of other times. There have been disappointments and devastations intertwined with our successes — and rooting for whom we root in New York carries its own special burdens — but we haven't had to give ourselves a pep talk every single day for seventeen years in order to let loose with a “Let's Go Mets!” There are times when the Mets actually do go and go far.

This month is not one of those times, and knowing somebody has it worse doesn't really help. But somebody does have it worse. Being a Mets fan at this moment is no picnic. Being a Pirates fan for the past seventeen years is a blindfold and a cigarette.

Oh, and Nate, if you're still out there — you can have Oliver Perez back any time you like.

Even if we're now bound by the brotherhood of losing records, one thing Mets fans have that Pirates fans don't is AMAZIN' TUESDAY, the final 2009 edition of which is coming to Two Boots Tavern on the Lower East Side, 7:00 P.M., September 15. Please join Mets By The Numbers' Jon Springer and me as we welcome our special guests The Bad Guys Won author Jeff Pearlman and Metstradamus mastermind John Coppinger. There'll be great pizza, cold beer, loads of baseball talk…and a Mets game from Turner Field on TV just to make sure the evening isn't too perfect.

Lost to the Mahoning Valley Scrappers, 3-1. Season over.

Sigh.

There is scant comfort in baseball this year.

There are worse things than realizing your baseball team is bad.

For instance, there's realizing you long ago stopped noticing your baseball team is bad.

The Mets played the Marlins, and the Mets lost, with just a few bright flickers amid the gloom. There was Josh Thole, getting his first big-league RBI and continuing to show a good eye and a compact stroke. There was a nifty play at the plate, with Jeff Francoeur's throw from right bouncing up and over Thole's glove, past Elmer Dessens, off the back wall, into the hand Dessens shot desperately skyward, and from there being relayed hastily back to Thole to tag out a rather startled Dan Uggla. Just your routine 9-2-Wall-1-2 putout.

And there was Carlos Beltran, back from exile at long last. With the season thoroughly lost, I was startled by how emotional I was to see Beltran back on the field. Emily and Joshua and I had seen him on Sunday, wearing Cyclones red and white, and he looked awful, striking out three times and popping to second to end the game. (For video-board purposes the Mets somehow upgraded this to the climactic hit in a walk-off win. If only.) But he looked sufficiently like himself tonight to make you wonder what could have been: He made a sliding catch in left-center, and almost put the Mets in the lead with a drive to the right-field fence.

But almost wasn't enough, and almost was about as good as it got at Citi Field, which was empty as I've seen it this year. The silver lining to that, if I peer hard enough, was that my friend Lyle (a Mets fan relocated to L.A., with a Faith and Fear cameo involving a luckless Staten Island trip) was making his first-ever visit to Citi Field and so got to tour the park and get Blue Smoke in relative leisure. Lyle's mini-review: Great park, but feels like a replica. I can see that.

Happily, it was a beautiful night, and baseball is a pleasure even when there's nothing much to cheer about. Lyle and I camped out in the fancy Caesars Club seats (half-price on StubHub) surrounded by family and friends of the girl who sang the National Anthem, most of whom departed about halfway through the game. Lyle caught a shirt; as the game ground on the already-sparse crowd dwindled sufficiently that we seemed like a near-lock to get a birthday flower cake or be summoned for the latest round of combat between those age-old rivals the forklift and the light tower. (I snagged two abandoned t-shirts made to celebrate the anthem singer's big night. No, I'm not sure why.) In the eighth inning Lyle and I realized that we were the only motivated parties left in a two-section stretch of prime foul-ball territory; we spent the ninth standing on either side of a railing, on our toes like the world's oldest ballhawks.

Which was when two interlopers arrived, obviously to steal our about-to-arrive foul balls.

But wait! It was my co-blogger, accompanied by longtime Faith and Fear reader Sharon. They'd wandered into our section randomly.

One of the things I've liked best about Citi Field is that the funneling of traffic from the rotunda along the field-level concourse to the bridge and the eating area and from there to the escalators virtually guarantees that I'll run into someone I know. I'd said as much to Lyle, which of course meant this time I encountered nobody … until Greg and Sharon arrived. I started to note triumphantly that my point had been proven in rather dramatic fashion, then looked around the somnolent, nearly vacant ballpark and reconsidered the odds. The Mets finished losing, with nary a foul ball heading our way, and bloggers and guests said farewell and headed out of the park into an ever-longer night of an ever-shorter season.

As the season gets shorter, 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.

I'm standing on the LIRR platform Sunday morning, waiting for my train to Woodside. It is obvious from my garb where I'm going. Guy dressed in black, right through to his backpack, comes up to me and asks, “Who's pitching today?”

“Pelfrey,” I say. “Gonna have a nice comeback.”

“Comeback?” he laughs. “Fifteen out of the Wild Card?”

“I don't mean the Mets, just Pelfrey. He's gonna have a good start.”

“Yeah, y'know what? I think he will, too.”

“He's due.”

Nice exchange, right? Just two passersby talking Mets baseball…what more could there be to it?

“Listen,” my new companion says, producing two single dollar bills and changing the subject. “I need to buy a ticket for the train and I'm a few dollars short, and I hate to ask, but…”

Ah, the old Long Island Rail Road ticket scam. How many times have I been the prey for this? For as long as I can remember, whether we're in a recession or an economic boom, there inevitably crops up a would-be commuter who has somehow appeared at whichever station I happen to be, always just a few dollars short of fare into Manhattan or back home. Not a “bum,” just someone who lost his wallet or ran into unforeseen circumstances. His stated predicament can't help but draw out a twinge of empathy — gosh, I'd hate to be in that situation, but if I were, I sure hope somebody would help me out.

I used to believe these stories. I used to believe that somebody could show up for a train bereft of four dollars or six dollars or however much a single off-peak ride cost at that moment. I used to want to believe it, I suppose. I would never ask for this kind of help unless I really needed it. How could anybody else? Eventually, I hardened my shell a bit and just grumbled “no” or wandered away in the middle of the pitch. I don't like being played for a sucker.

But the man in black on Sunday went the extra mile. He talked Mets with me. He acknowledged Mets with me at any rate. He even did it in a manner I could respect — not pretending the Mets were any good just because I was wearing a Mets cap and a Mets shirt, but tamping down my expectations for a miracle playoff run when he misunderstood my “comeback” forecast at first. And he didn't say they're “a million games out” or something disparagingly non-specific. He said they were fifteen games out of the Wild Card.

Which is exactly what they were. He may not have been able to purchase a ticket for the train, but he apparently paid attention to the standings.

A small-time scam artist who knew not just that the Mets sucked, but exactly how much they sucked. I don't respect the scam, but I do respect the research.

So I gave him a buck.

“Hey man, thanks,” he said, accepting the dollar that was still going to leave him quite a bit short of getting anywhere other than the next station (especially if he planned on buying a ticket on the train, which is where they really getcha). I told him, sure, no problem, good luck. As he began walking down the platform to work another mark, he added, “Listen, the Mets are gonna win today. Francoeur's gonna hit TWO home runs!”

I didn't believe for a second he desperately needed to be on the very next train (and indeed when the next one pulled in to the station, he u-turned toward the stairs presumably to gear up for his next group of potential clientele), but he did leave me believing that a) the Mets would win and b) Francoeur would hit two home runs. The Mets did win. Francoeur didn't homer, but still…not “David Wright's gonna hit two homers,” but Jeff Francoeur. Nobody who doesn't keep up with the Mets would have said Jeff Francoeur.

That much, I decided, was worth the buck.