Sweaty day from an atmospheric standpoint. Horrible day from a hamstring standpoint. Resilient day from an adversity standpoint. Relaxing, perhaps invigorating day from a post-delusional standpoint (if the Mets and Cards should meet in the playoffs it could get pretty steamy once more…though if the Mets are in the 2009 playoffs, October will be a most chilly month in Hell). Most importantly, one sweet day from a reunion standpoint. But the standpoint I think I'll remember most from Wednesday is Citi Field's embrace of that which it so assiduously avoids obvious association.

Citi Field got its inner Shea Stadium on Wednesday afternoon.

New World Class Home of the New York Mets, my Aase. Its facade may self-consciously scream Ebbets Field, but deep down, the soul of Shea stirs. Not the happy, fun Shea either.

My goal in going to Citi Field Wednesday was onefold. Dave Murray, whom you hopefully know as the Massapequa expatriate turned Mets Guy In Michigan, was going to be there with his dad, his son and his cousin for the very first time. Knowing my attendance record at the ballpark I never particularly wanted built is pretty constant, he asked me if I'd be there.

I will now, I said.

Thanks to a very thoughtful friend and blogger-in-arms, I had obtained admission to the matinee. That the seat I had was in Promenade and the seats Dave's family had were in Field Level didn't make me much nevermind. I just wanted to say hello, shake hands and fix a time and spot to meet so we could watch an inning or two later on. The beauty of Citi Field, as Jeff Wilpon and Kevin Burkhardt relentlessly repeated in those SNY infomercials all winter and spring, was that the new place would have plenty of “cool places” where Mets fans could “hang out”. I had no intention on intruding on either Murraypalooza '09 or seats to which my ticket didn't entitle me. I just wanted to arrange to “hang out” in one of those “cool places”.

Should have been easy to nail down, right? That's why they invented cell phones. Except repeated pregame calls and texts by me to Dave after I arrived were going unanswered. Maybe he was busy. I know he likes to take a lot of pictures and he had plenty to photograph. I don't always hear or feel my phone at a ballgame either (because I'm often watching the ballgame). I knew what section he'd be in, so I headed there and could see him, resplendent in a No. 41 jersey, shooting away.

I called him again. No answer again. Well, maybe I can go down there.

Not so fast.

Citi Field has done away with the usher concept that was such an impediment to the Shea Stadium experience. In this inaugural season, I've seen no filthy rags, I've been ostentatiously guided to no locations I could find myself, I've kept my singles in my wallet (at least until they found their way into the coffers of various concessions). I haven't missed the ushers one bit. If my seat is wet, I'm on my own, but I know where napkins are kept.

But there are ushers at Citi Field, even if they're not called that, even if their job description has been realigned to enforcing rules that are at best semi-sensical. I've heard, for example, that they're expert at keeping many fans away from Field Level for batting practice. As we all know, unauthorized asses can sap the cushioning from Field Level seats, so this is a perfectly reasonable protection of the literal fabric of Citi Field. And if a kid from some other part of the ballpark can't get an autograph from a Met…well, let the kid go out beyond centerfield to one of those distractions they've implanted to keep him or her from paying attention to the main attraction of a baseball game. I'm sure it will serve the Mets well when that same kid forms no particular attachment to the Mets because going to a game winds up being one big blur of bells and whistles indistinguishable from everything else that attacks his or her senses in the course of growing up.

So anyway, about ten minutes before gametime I'm at the top of the section where I can see Dave, whom I hadn't seen in three years. And I tell the non-usher my situation: my friend is down there from Michigan, I just want to let him know I'm here, I can't reach him on the phone. The man was professional and courteous in that way they obviously drill into them. “I'm sorry, sir, I can't let you down there without a ticket” And I explain again that, yes, I understand, but I just want to alert him to my presence — I'm not trying to sit there, I'm not trying to pull a fast one, you can even have my bag as collateral.

I was told he couldn't watch my bag.

“Do you mind if I stand here and shout for his attention?” I asked.

That was OK. So I start to lean as close in as I can, but that wasn't allowed either because I dared to cross the bar that separates the concourse from the last row (mind you, the game had not begun yet), so I was asked to step back. I apologized to a woman standing nearby for my imminent rudeness and let loose.

“DAVE! DAVE MURRAY! DAVE! DAVE FROM MICHIGAN!”

Predictably, despite timing my plaintive cries for delivery between public address blare, this proved ineffective. It occurred to me at the same moment that it occurred to the woman next to me (while the non-usher stood by impervious to the stupidity he had helped create) that the answer here was to find someone who was walking down in Dave's general direction and ask that person to get his attention for me. I felt like a 19th century street urchin begging for the aid of someone more well off than myself, but it was, at that moment, my only option. I indeed found a man walking by the non-usher and tapped him on the shoulder just before he got away and asked him, please, if you don't mind, I hate to be a bother, but would you be so kind to get the attention of that fellow down there wearing No. 41? Just point him my way.

And because that man is not an employee of the New York Mets, he was most helpful. He went to Dave, and moments later, Dave and his dad were bounding up the stairs to greet me.

There. Was that so hard?

Dave's phone wasn't getting any reception, he said, but he, too, wanted to hang out. I told him where I was sitting and that he should come up later and until then, please enjoy the game with your family.

I wonder if I became the first fan in the history of Citi Field to convince somebody on Field Level to sneak up to Promenade.

As you may have figured out for yourself, what wound up happening after a few innings — considering the plethora of empty seats on all levels for a 12:10 start designed to convenience no one but day campers and ballplayers with a westbound flight to catch — is Dave came to Promenade with his dad's ticket for me to flash downstairs (to a different non-usher) and I spent roughly the second half of the game hanging out with my usually misplaced Midwestern blolleague and his kin in the coolest place of all at baseball game: seats with a view of the baseball game. That I landed closer to the field than I started…well that was nice, too, but I swear that purloining proximity was not my mission. I just wanted to watch the Mets in person in the company of a friend who wanted to do the same in the least onerous manner possible. Like I said, there were loads of empty seats, so I don't think anybody suffered in this transaction. (Hope this doesn't inspire Citi Field's management to replace paper tickets with Dark Angel-style barcodes on the backs of our necks to discourage this form of insidious fan behavior in the future.)

Organizationally speaking, the Mets can indulge their brick fetish to an extreme that would intimidate even the biggest, baddest wolf on the block. They can overwhelm you with retail options that leave you wondering how they ever managed to squeeze a ballfield into the middle of this shoppers paradise. They can deign to sell you consistently edible food that, if you're in the right frame of mind, seems almost worth the price. They can burnish the thrill of a New York Mets win by projecting a reel of Brooklyn Dodgers highlights as you exit. They can even train their personnel to call you “sir” almost as if they mean it. But they can never quite conceal their contempt for their customers or trust their guests enough to stop suspecting most of us are small-time criminals on the make.

And I keep coming back.

Approved reading on every level: 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.

The Global Sports Fraternity, meanwhile, has some great behind-the-scenes footage of what really goes in the Mets front office. And Mets Walkoffs uncovers the additional delight embedded in the details of an immensely unusual — even for the Mets — 9-0 triumph.

On July 4, 1914, the Boston Braves languished in eighth place in the eight-team National League with a record of 26-40, which left them 15 games out of first place. They won 68 of their next 87, took the pennant by 10½ games and then swept the defending world champion Philadelphia A’s in the World Series. Of all the improbable comeback stories baseball has known, it’s hard to imagine one more startling than that of the team that became known as the Miracle Braves — 14 games under, 7 teams to climb over, a swing of 25½ games anyway. They did all that after experiencing 11 consecutive losing seasons and second-division finishes.

How did they do it?

They didn’t have a runner from second stop at third on singles to right in the first inning.

They didn’t have a stolen base attempt end their biggest inning against the best-throwing catcher in the game.

They didn’t have their offense stop scoring after that big fifth inning.

They didn’t have their ace starter give up five earned runs in eight innings.

They didn’t have their closer give up a two-run lead in the ninth inning.

They didn’t have their manager bring in a reliever to replace a reliever who just retired his first batter in the tenth inning on one pitch.

They didn’t have their second baseman, who started the game as the fill-in shortstop, throw away an easy out at first base when that second reliever came in.

They didn’t have that shortstop/second baseman at second base because their regular second baseman didn’t fall down the dugout steps and sprain his ankle in the seventh inning.

They didn’t have their regular second baseman fall down the dugout steps and sprain his ankle.

They didn’t have their regular shortstop in a perpetual limbo of misdiagnoses and magnetic resonance imagery.

They didn’t have that second reliever load the bases in the tenth on a single and a walk following the outl the fill-in second baseman who started the game as the fill-in shortstop threw away.

They didn’t have their manager bring in, with the bases loaded, a reliever who lost his last decision by hitting one batter and walking another before eventually uncorking a wild pitch.

They didn’t have that reliever hit his first batter with his first pitch, forcing in the go-ahead run.

They didn’t have that same reliever give up a grand slam to the next hitter — the best hitter in the game, the same hitter who earlier doubled, singled and homered off their ace starter.

They didn’t have the best hitter in the game snap an 0-for-13 slump against them.

They didn’t have a three-run lead entering the eighth turn into a five-run loss in the tenth.

They didn’t have a third consecutive loss — each of which was eminently winnable — follow a rousing come-from-behind victory that appeared capable of catapulting them toward greater heights.

They didn’t have that singular win preceded by back-to-back losses that came on the heels of a five-game winning streak that seemed to have, perhaps, righted their long-listing ship.

They didn’t have the momentum of a 5-0 spurt negated by the malaise of a 1-5 skid.

They didn’t have a record, after 106 games, of 6 under .500, leaving them 9 out of a playoff spot with 7 teams to climb over.

The 1914 Boston Braves, by the time they played as many games as the 2009 New York Mets, were in second place, two games from the league lead, a position they secured for good 15 games later.

As of July 4, 1914, the Boston Braves had a chance in hell.

As of August 4, 2009, the New York Mets have none.

***

• Thanks to those of you who forwarded pictures illustrating how you’ve allowed Mets fandom to infect your offspring. We should be sending Child Protective Services to your home, but instead will send you and yours the fun and attractive Mets Coloring & Activity Book from Hawk’s Nest Publishing.

• If you’d like to take the field where the New York Mets do, just wait and they’ll call you soon enough. (Hey, it worked for Angel Berroa.) But if you’re the impatient type, tickets remain available to the big end-of-season Gary, Keith & Ron shindig October 3. For $120, you get a seat in the Big Apple section, you get a buffet, you get a concessions gift card and you get to enter the playing surface of Citi Field before the game to sing the National Anthem en masse. The proceeds, as ever, benefit the Pitch In For A Good Cause Foundation.

• Since you won’t need to waste time studying the standings for the rest of the year, you can put your reading abilities to good use with a copy of 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.

• Enjoy the next 56 games as best you can. It’s Mets baseball. Fresh evidence notwithstanding, it’s better than nothing.

“They battled.”

It's a line that makes any Mets fan cringe and mutter, remembering a miscast Art Howe facing the chop-licking New York media after another loss. It was Art's kindly placeholder comment, his verbal shrug of the shoulders, his way of not saying, “What do you think I can do with this collection of once-weres and never-will-bes, palookas and tomato cans and misfit toys — win ballgames?”

With Joshua still up in Connecticut, Emily and I had a night to ourselves, and my wife promptly unveiled Reason #10,539 that I do not deserve her: This was one of the games on the 15-game plan she shares with her dad, but he was out of town too, so we were going to Citi Field.

From our Promenade perch high above home plate, it didn't seem like a particularly good idea at first. Somewhere down there was Nelson Figueroa, introduced rather ominously by the strains of Eminem's “Lose Yourself” (“you only get one shot,” etc.) And Nelson wasn't exactly making his escape from 8 Mile Road. In fact, he was getting hit so startlingly hard that you half-expected the next line drive to leave him sprawled on the mound in his skivvies surrounded by articles of clothing, Charlie Brown-style. You could tell how bad it was with your eyes closed: Ball after ball hit by Diamondback after Diamondback made the kind of sound that causes veteran fans to hurry back up the ramp or lean closer to the radio. With not quite two crooked-number innings complete, Figueroa was finally allowed to crawl away, chased by boos, with his team in a 6-0 hole. Around this time of family of late arrivals got themselves settled, looked at the scoreboard and did a double-take. Sorry folks. Emily and I just shrugged. The game had all the makings of a debacle, but it had become a nice night and there was the green of Citi Field spread out before us, and a night at the ballpark isn't a thing to take for granted even when you devoutly wish the scoreboard had better news.

And then, whaddya know? The boys … well. I'm squirming here, but you know what they did? They battled. As the lowest-caste member of the pitching staff, Tim Redding was forced out of the bullpen at batpoint to absorb the seemingly inevitable beating and somehow emerged with 3 1/3 innings of one-hit ball to his credit. Then, down five, the Mets staged an insurrection against Danny Haren. Cora and Santos singled, Pagan walked, and Luis Castillo brought the crowd to its feet in happy delight with a two-run single. Wright then followed that with one of his own, scoring Pagan and moving Castillo to second. 6-4 Mets, two on and one out, Gary Sheffield coming to the plate.

We're going to win this game, I thought to myself — and Sheff promptly bounced into a double play.

Yeah, the Mets had chances after that: Murphy's long home run brought them to within one, and Parnell, Feliciano and Stokes somehow avoided the two or three tack-on runs that generally put an end to fantasies of insurrection in games like these. But they missed those chances and went out with a whimper, with a loss that had some gallantry to pluck from it but was still a loss.

Still, Emily and I left not too terribly disappointed. Nice night, the team tried to come back, 7 express waiting to whisk us home. I like to say that the second-best thing you can do with an evening is watch your team lose a baseball game, but I've never really meant that. Being disappointed requires expectations, and mine have been recalibrated pretty thoroughly by now.

The season was lost a while back amid injuries and poor front-office decisions and bad luck, and the team that remains is one whose highest aspirations concern breaking even, not playoff odds. They battled. It's not enough and it can't be acceptable, but it's understandable. Here's one, however reluctantly, for Art Howe.

That's a gloomy note to go out on, so let's end with something a little different.

The folks at Hawk's Nest Publishing were kind enough to send us four copies of the latest edition of their Mets Coloring & Activity Book. I admit I'm not usually a fan of such books, but this one is pretty cool: It's got lots of puzzles and games, but what really grabs you are the illustrations. They've been artfully derived from well-chosen photos, and capture the likes of Wright and Reyes and Delgado (remember them) really well. They're fun to look at if you're an adult, so I imagine they'll be fun to color if you're a kid. (You can see sample illustrations from the book and order copies here.)

Anyway, seems like a useful aid for bringing up the next generation (W)right. So here's our impromptu contest: We'll send a copy of the coloring book to the first four people who send us a digital picture of their kid (or a family shot, or whatever) in a properly celebratory pose, wearing Mets garb. Send 'em to faithandfear@gmail.com, and we'll let you know if you've won. (Don't worry, we won't use your photo on the site or anything like that without asking you first.)

Because hey, hopefully next year we'll all have more to cheer about.

WE HAVE OUR WINNERS. THANKS FOR SENDING SUCH GREAT PICTURES.

Remember the cheers of better years (and the gloom of worse ones, too) in Faith and Fear in Flushing, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

Five years ago today, Bob Murphy, the flagship voice of the New York Mets, passed away at age 79. He lives on in audio archives as well as in the hearts and memories of Mets fans everywhere. At the end of each home victory at Citi Field, public address announcer Alex Anthony offers the “Happy Recap,” which of course became Murph's signature postgame phrase in the course of his Hall of Fame Mets announcing career, one that commenced with the franchise's inception in 1962 and continued into its fifth decade. Though a statue or other physical memorial accessible to Mets fans would be most welcome (the radio booth is named in his honor as it was at Shea Stadium), I believe keeping alive the Happy Recap is as marvelous a tribute to Murph as any the Mets could bestow.

The following is adapted from a series of posts Faith and Fear ran a couple of years ago in which we honored the Happy Recap as one of the Quintessential Mets bedrocks of our unique baseball culture. It is offered here as a way to fondly recall Bob Murphy, whose voice will always be missed but never be forgotten.

Bob Murphy called games for the Baltimore Orioles and Boston Red Sox, yet no fan of those teams could possibly connect the words Happy and Recap the way we acolytes of the New York Mets can. Murphy was always a true professional, but he reached and stayed at the top of his profession in the 42 seasons broadcasting the exploits of those who wore the orange and blue and shading them with requisite amounts of honesty, accuracy and warmth. However many Happy Recaps he delivered depended upon the actions of the players on the field below him.

There might have been 108 Happy Recaps, as there were in 1986, plus seven more in the postseason. There were usually dozens fewer. Lord knows there were arid stretches when the recaps grew less frequently happy than we would have preferred. But those that occurred, whenever they occurred, felt every bit as special as any that Murph summed up in 1986 or 1969. Bob Murphy was sunshine when darkness descended on Shea, not just between Met championships but long afterwards. He is remembered at his best for 1986, yes, but also for 1962, clear through to 2003. Bad years, good years, all years. Murph made each recap and every pitch that preceded them happy affairs just by communicating them.

Bob Murphy and Bill Buckner are linked forever through Mookie Wilson's fair ball that got by Buckner and the aftermath that allowed the Mets to live another day. What aftermath was that?

Rounding third Knight! The Mets win! They win!

The call lives on every bit as much as the result. Bob Murphy, however, wasn't just about those incandescent moments of victory any more than the 1986 world championship was constructed solely from one first baseman's error. Here he was on the radio broadcasting the end of an equally incredible, equally emotional Game Six thirteen years later.

The count is three and two. Now the pitch…he walked him! The season is over for the New York Mets. Kenny Rogers walked Andruw Jones forcing in the winning run from third base, Gerald Williams heads into score, and it's celebration time for the Atlanta Braves. What a horrible loss for the New York Mets.

Both Game Six events would have an intense feel to them regardless of who told you about them, but coming from Murph as opposed to Vin Scully or Bob Costas, it was coming from family. He was our great baseball uncle. He was blood. He cared because we cared. He cared because he cared, too. Announcing Mets games may have been a job for Bob Murphy, but did you ever detect the slightest ounce of clock-punching in his delivery? Every game was the biggest game Bob Murphy ever broadcast. Considering that The Happy Recap was never guaranteed and more than half the time impossible, that's an utterly magnificent feat. As few and far between as Game Sixes are, there is no plural version of Bob Murphy. There is only one.

But Murph wasn't perfect, even in the lingering afterglow of memory. Yes, it's true. There were a few flaws in his delivery.

Unbridled optimism in the face of a stretch of 64-98 seasons could get to you a little.

In later years he blew fly balls — had them being caught when going out and going out when being caught.

He blew smoke in his partner's face, not a good thing for either of them.

Once referred to Al Leiter as Larry Dierker.

Hosted Bowling For Dollars, though that could be taken as a plus in some quarters.

When you get right down to it, however, there is no way any true blue and orange Mets fan can find any real fault with Bob Murphy. There was only good to be had across his 42 seasons behind the Mets microphone. Put him and his signature up against broadcast ideal and…

Yes — they win the damn thing.

The Happy Recap is, to be precise, what Bob Murphy promised following a Mets win. He didn't make a big thing of it. He never teased it through the broadcast, didn't say “wow, the Mets are up seven to one, so you know there will be a Happy Recap when this game is over.” Can you imagine Murph being that self-serving? The fans and the game were his constituency. If the Mets lost, there was no mention of a Happy Recap. If they won, there would be a quick word that we (“we,” not “I”) would be back with The Happy Recap after this message.

When Murph returned from commercial, it was all about what Cleon Jones or Jerry Koosman or Del Unser or Craig Swan or Steve Henderson or The Man They Call Nails Lenny Dykstra or David Arthur Kingman or Ronnie Darling or John Olerud or you name him did. It was about the players and the Mets and the final score here at Shea Stadium, the New York Mets seven, the San Diego Padres one; our next broadcast will be…

That was it. That was The Happy Recap. A short summation, the runs, the hits, the errors and a signoff. Yet that little tail applied to the end of an afternoon or evening became a signature like nobody else's in Mets broadcast history. Nobody ever played up The Happy Recap per se. We all just knew about it. We tapped it out like Murph Code. For 42 years those were our words to root by, our goal to strive for. And when Bob Murphy stopped announcing for good in 2003, they stayed with us.

That's the power of the local announcer, the local radio announcer. Murph did TV, too, from 1962 through 1981, rotating back and forth between booths with Ralph Kiner, Lindsey Nelson, Steve Albert and, briefly, Art Shamsky, but it was Frank Cashen's genius to assign him to permanent wireless duty in 1982. It was seen as a demotion of sorts in those days. From the invention of television, television was the glamour medium of our time. Stars were on TV. Home run-hitting, Cadillac-driving Ralph Kiner would stay on TV.

But somebody forgot to tell baseball. Baseball never stopped being at its best on the radio. We were realizing that all over again in the 1980s as a generation that had grown up smuggling a million transistors under a million blankets told its stories. Television could show us much. Radio could tell it all.

That was Bob Murphy's genius. He painted the word picture, the best picture you could have for a baseball game. The man didn't conduct a talk show from behind a WHN or WFAN microphone. He told you what was going on on the field. He told you who was warming up in the bullpen. He told you who the manager had left on his bench. He did it in a way that kept you engaged when the game was dragging and in a manner that kept you riveted when the game was bursting at the seams. He never discounted the possibility of a Mets comeback, which was darn thoughtful of him.

Bob Murphy clicked with a mass of New Yorkers despite — maybe because — he was most un-New Yorkish. Forty-two years on the job and he never picked up a vocal inflection to indicate this was home for more than half his life. Blessedly he never betrayed an ounce of the native cynicism either. Whatever negative thoughts Murph may have brought to the ballpark he put aside when the light went on. Bob Murphy knew he wasn't granted hour after hour of airtime to air his grievances. He was there to bring us a pair of four-letter words we will eternally associate with him…even more so than “damn”.

He brought us Mets. And he brought us hope.

To this day, we constitute a most receptive audience for his signal.

An appreciation of Bob Murphy, written in the hours after I learned of his passing, appears here.

Jules, y'know, honey…this isn't real. You know what it is? It's St. Elmo's Fire. Electric flashes of light that appear in dark skies out of nowhere. Sailors would guide entire journeys by it, but the joke was on them…there was no fire. There wasn't even a St. Elmo. They made it up. They made it up because they thought they needed it to keep them going when times got tough, just like you're making up all of this. We're all going through this. It's our time on the edge.

—Billy Hicks, 1985

SUB-.500 PLAUSIBILITY TRACKER

Through 104 Games Played

1973: 47-57, 6th of 6, 9½ GB

2001: 47-57, 4th of 5, 11½ GB

2009: 50-54, 8th of 8, 7½ GB

One hopes that whoever cuddles up beside various Met faces these nights likes beards. I don't think the No Shave 'Til .500 charge toward statistical mediocrity is about to cause a run on razors at anybody's local CVS.

It's tough to revert to cynicism so soon after you felt pangs of hopefulness, but that's what a sub-.500 team will do for your outlook more often than not. We may have forgotten what schlepping around rooting for a team that loses more games than it wins is like. We've had quite a bit of practice in 2009, having gurgled below sea level now for an entire month.

I reckon we're in for some more practice.

Oh, it's not over 'til it's over and stranger things have happened, but sometimes proximity to “over” is an accurate barometer — and there's a reason ordinary things happen so much more frequently than strange things. I don't believe the Last Chance Cafe has booted us out just yet, but closing time is closing in, even when one accounts for the presence of tomorrow, which, with two months to go, still remains only a day away.

Yes, sufficient tomorrows have been stockpiled for that which is highly improbable, yet there are only nine more Sundays in this season. I counted them up after this Sunday's not quite horrific but not at all encouraging defeat was Jon Garland-complete. I had switched to TBS to check out the Giants and Phillies. I was rooting, good taste aside, for the Phillies. Back when we competed in the National League East, I never would have done that. But the National League East no longer exists for our purposes. We are a member in tenuous standing of the National League Ad Hoc Division. We are eighth in that eight-team circuit — less invested observers would say we are eighth of seven.

It was a familiar reflex, flipping from SNY to wherever I could find news on the other game that matters most to us. I've done it every September these last few years. Except this wasn't September. It was barely August. But because rain drove the Mets' finish toward 6:30, and because the Giants were in San Francisco, and because shadows do late September things in early August to baseball diamonds when it's 6:30 on the East Coast and 3:30 on the West Coast, it felt unseasonably late there on TBS. It felt like it did those final weekends the last two years, tracking the Phillies versus Washington or the Brewers against the Cubs.

But it felt that way only in the worst and most fleeting regard. The Giants were about to win. The Rockies had already won. All the other entanglements of the N.L. Ad Hoc were too messy to decipher. I just knew we had fallen 7½ behind the co-leaders and were still eighth among eight. Our plausibility as a Wild Card contender, despite a week twice flecked with Grand Illusion — first almost incidentally from Tatis, then more emphatically from Pagan — had not budged a whit in seven days' time. We were 7½ back when we began this thus far 4-3 homestand, and we're 7½ back now.

We haven't lost ground but we didn't gain any. A week went by. One more Sunday fell away. We have only nine left. Nine weeks, starting tonight. In the past two years the final Sunday marked our baseball-tragic downfall. There appears little chance that the ninth of our nine 2009 Sundays will threaten nearly that much angst.

The reason I've been doggedly attempting to track the fluctuations of the Wild Card market isn't out of some steadfast belief that the Mets will prevail. You Gotta Believe, sure, but you also have to have your head examined if you believe a team whose .500-or-bust beards are likely to serve as throw rugs before they touch one single blade from Gillette is headed for that ninth Sunday with a playoff spot squarely on the line. At this point, it's not about the destination. It's about defending the journey from cancellation. It's about experiencing undeniable plausibility until every single indicator says Absolutely Not. It's about maintaining a shred of the sense of purpose that has provided the ballast of our baseball seasons since 2005.

We're down to scraps of hope now. Like the grand slams. Like the balls that bounced through and over the Rockies. Like the undermanned World War II movie battalion of Fighting Metfish* Sgt. Cora has led into battle — Murphy! Frenchy! Sully! Brooklyn! Oh no, Misch just took one right in the heart! Boys…we're gonna have to go on without Misch, but if he were here, I know he'd want you to go down swinging against Dan Haren. Like the precious few fifth inning moments Sunday when, with the Fighting Metfish down three, Frenchy homered, Sully tripled, Sgt. Cora doubled and Ol' Sheff, he hit a screaming liner that…

…Chad Tracy caught, all but ending the inning, the rally, the threat and, I don't know, maybe the Mets' chances in 2009.

The Mets had more ups coming and 58 games beyond that. Yet by their last up Sunday, even when Frenchy reached base with two out, it wasn't feeling like this was a Wild Card chase any longer. It wasn't even feeling like an improbable Wild Card chase, not like it did in the fifth, certainly not like it did on Saturday night when I came home on the wings of Angel Pagan's grand slam sensing something was truly cooking, and humming what I instantly adopted as this playoff chase's theme song.

It seems the Mets A/V squad has chosen Bruce Springsteen's “The Rising” to describe what the Mets are trying to do vis-à-vis the Wild Card pack. “Come on up for the rising,” I heard play at least twice at game's onset this week. Nice thought, but given Perez's and Pelfrey's outings, this would seem to refer mostly to the rising pitch counts of Mets starters. In the context of Mets playoff chase themes, “The Rising” seems destined to go the obscure way of “Ain't No Mountain High Enough,” which is what the Mets began to play after the victories that vaulted them into their unlikely 2001 plausibility, at least in the early portion of that particular rising (before circumstances demanded all musical cues revolve around America and New York).

By winning five in a row over Houston and Colorado, the Motown classic most appropriate to the Mets' longshot quest might have been “You Keep Me Hangin' On,” but my playoff theme song was less familiar, a number I'd only stumbled into last week.

Pretty soon we were takin' it serious

I'm tellin' you

I know Neil Diamond has been discredited in the ears of Mets fans thanks to the miscasting of “Sweet Caroline” as a Citi Field favorite, but don't let that stop you from enjoying “Delirious Love,” particularly the version in which Brian Wilson offers harmonies. It's from the 12 Songs CD, produced in 2005 by the most successful alumnus of the Long Beach High School Class of 1981, which is neither here nor there (except to say I loaned Rick Rubin my copy of Kosher Comics long before he ever took Communion with Johnny Cash). I heard it in the midst of the Mets' five-game winning streak and it struck me as most appropriate for what may or may not have been on the brink of happening with our ballclub.

To the sound of the beat

Me and you being spent on delirious love

And then Angel Pagan launches a grand slam over the heretofore forbidden left field wall and maybe it was delirium taking over, but could this be real? Could these Mets, with injured troops reportedly mending, with enough guts and gumption to cover their absences just a little longer, with 6½ games between us and the Wild Card lead — 6 in the all-important loss column — could these Mets actually be onto something beyond keeping us hanging on?

Like a ride on a rocket it took us up

Was a reason to live another day

There's a great little refrain in “Delirious Love,” in which Neil repeats the phrase “I Can Feel It” thrice. That's perfect for this kind of thing. I could feel it when we took it to the Rockies Thursday afternoon. I could feel it when Pagan went deep. But on Sunday, once Sheffield didn't drive home Sullivan despite smoking Garland's delivery toward right, I couldn't feel it any longer.

We had been a Wild Card contender for a week. It didn't feel like we were anymore. As the next thirteen Mets outs passed almost without interruption, we felt less and less plausible. We felt the way I remember us last feeling in the last few weeks of 2005, the way I last felt August feeling in 2004. The Mets of 2009 had rarely played on a par with where they competed, collapses notwithstanding, in 2008, 2007, 2006 and most of 2005, yet this season felt of a piece with the era those seasons represented. Expectations were high, enthusiasm was resilient and the Mets were almost always reaching for something more. As Sunday's game ended, it felt almost as if all that had reached the end of the line.

Maybe it has. Maybe it hasn't quite yet. When it inevitably does, it will be unfortunate because baseball seasons are always better when you're sure you're rooting for something to happen, not something to end. Pretty soon it seems very likely what the Giants, the Rockies and five other teams are doing won't be of any real concern to us. Pretty soon the Mets are going to have to clear the forestry from their faces and we shouldn't begrudge them their shaves, no matter how far they and their best-intention beards may fall from triumphant.

I don't like our chances. But I sure like having them.

*Concept courtesy of Matt Groening by way of Matt Silverman last Monday night.

Take your chance with a copy of Faith and Fear in Flushing, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

On June 19, 2001, a new Mets farm team took the field at Jamestown, N.Y.'s Diethrick Park. The Brooklyn Cyclones had arrived — attended by the kind of hype that's not exactly normal fare for the New York-Penn League. The Cyclones were bringing pro baseball back to Brooklyn, and in doing so were healing (at least in some tiny way) a wound that had borne by the borough for 44 years, since the departure of the Dodgers from Ebbets Field and New York City. (They now play, it's rumored, somewhere far away.)

The Cyclones actually weren't brand new; they'd been born as the St. Catharines Blue Jays in 1986 and bought by the Wilpons in 1999. Nor were they strangers to New York City: They'd played here in 2000, stuck with a final year of Blue Jays affiliation and burdened with the singularly terrible name Queens Kings. In 2000, in fact, the Mets had ran rather half-hearted ads suggesting fans truck out to St. John's University to attend games played by a Toronto farm team. This worked about as well as you'd expect.

But for 2001 things were put right: The team had the proper affiliation, a decent name and a new ballpark in Brooklyn. The young Cyclones, sensibly, began their season on the road, against the Jamestown Jammers. They won their first game, 2-1, behind a home run by Edgar Rodriguez and strong pitching by Luz Portobanco. (The first hit in Cyclones history was tallied by Noel Devarez.) After a series against the Vermont Lake Monsters Expos, they returned home to Keyspan Park on Coney Island on June 25 to face the Mahoning Valley Scrappers. The game, thick with politicians and camera crews, turned out to be a thriller. Rodriguez tied it with a two-run homer with two out in the ninth. In the 10th, with a runner on third, the Scrappers walked a batter intentionally to face 20-year-old catcher Michael Jacobs, who'd struck out four times. Jacobs hit a sacrifice fly to win the game.

It was the start of a love affair that, happily, has continued to this day. In 2001 the Cyclones were a hot ticket, setting a league record for attendance. Cyclones players showed up on MTV and occasionally turned up in Manhattan's hottest clubs, even though — like many a previous Gotham ingenue — many of them were underage and most of them couldn't afford to be there. Emily and I made a habit of riding the F train down to see them and spread the gospel. Though the Mets would make a gallant run at returning to the postseason that year, we came to love Keyspan Park as the Anti-Shea. It wasn't fancy — a concrete park with a single level and some bleachers — but where Shea's dinginess stemmed from an obsolete vision and surly neglect, Keyspan was utilitarian on purpose. And lots of nights, it was a lot more fun than the big-league park. The food was good, the staff were friendly, the music was cleverly chosen, and the between-innings antics were amusingly and properly bush-league. Moreover, the games generally zipped by in a tidy two hours or so, fueled by a shortage of balls fouled off and the minor-leaguers' disinclination to wander away from the batter's box or the mound between pitches. I'm as susceptible as anyone to starry-eyed baseball mythmaking, but the next time I'm moved to elegiac flights by a batter rearranging his batting gloves near the on-deck circle while everybody stands around will be the first time.

The Cyclones were fun, and they were good: They went 52-24 that year and an astonishing 30-8 at home. They beat the Staten Island Yankees in the playoffs, and took the first game of the best-of-three New York-Penn League Championship Series from the Williamsport Crosscutters. That game was on Sept. 10; the next day, baseball and everything else stopped. Unlike the Mets, the Cyclones would not get to resume their season: They and the Crosscutters were named co-champions.

Jacobs, the hero of the homecoming, had his moments, as did Rodriguez and Devarez and Portobanco and other names we'd learned in the first week. The Cyclones' best hitter was Frank Corr, a little fireplug who further endeared himself to the locals by living with his aunt in Mill Basin. The player we rooted for most avidly was John Toner, an awkward-looking corner outfielder who always seemed faintly surprised and utterly delighted to find himself playing ball. (Toner also taught us another difference between short-season A ball and the Show: When the Bay Ridge girls would squeal his name, he'd look eagerly into the stands.)

But the player in whom we invested the most hope was a 19-year-old center fielder. His name was Angel Pagan, one of those you-gotta-be-kidding-me names baseball seems to specialize in. (Seriously, doesn't “Angel Pagan” sound like some lemon-pussed, Gother-than-thou riot grrl band?) He had pouty good looks that played well on the scoreboard, judging from the reactions of the teenaged girls in the stands around us, but he also played well on the field. He was fleet-footed and graceful in the outfield and on the basepaths, and while he didn't have a ton of power, he could put balls in the gaps and knew how to work counts.

We'd been warned, amid the Baseball's Back in Brooklyn hype, that the lower reaches of the minor leagues were governed by pitiless math: Maybe one or two of the 2001 Cyclones might reach the majors. Baseball got exponentially harder with each level ascended, and being a star as a Brooklyn Cyclone didn't mean you'd be one as a Columbia Bomber or a St. Lucie Met. Few Cyclones would ever reach Double-A Binghamton, the first level at which a successful player could realistically think about the big leagues. Fewer still would ascend to Norfolk and the possibility of a Met callup.

We'd been warned, but we still liked to imagine what could be. Of all the Cyclones, Pagan looked the most like a major-leaguer. You could imagine him patrolling center field in Shea, having traded Cyclones' navy and red for blue and orange. How perfect would that be, the Cyclones' first heartthrob ascending all the way to the Show? We'd sit at Shea in our green mezzanine seats, wearing our Cyclones caps, and peer down at him, so much farther away than he'd been on Coney Island. And when he rifled one up the gap we'd high-five and tell people who didn't care that we'd watched him that first year at Keyspan. We'd watched him and cheered for him and just look at him now!

And then stuff happened.

Pagan did climb the minor-league ladder, continuing to ascend as the likes of Toner and Corr and Devarez and Rodriguez retired or were released short of their dreams. (Four 2001 Cyclones — Pagan, Jacobs, Danny Garcia and Lenny DiNardo — would make the big leagues, which is actually a pretty good crop.) Pagan finished 2004 as a Norfolk Tide and played the entire year at Triple-A in 2005. But he didn't earn a callup, and in January 2006 he was sold to the Chicago Cubs. He made the club out of spring training; I noted his debut and reminded myself, grumpily, that The Holy Books had no place for Cub fourth outfielders.

Emily and I continued to go to Keyspan to see the Cyclones — Joshua saw his first game there — and we always enjoyed ourselves. (With the exception of one unfortunate, isolated incident with Sandy the Seagull that I think my wife has finally forgiven.) But seeing the Cyclones has never been as fun as it was that first pinch-me summer. This is no fault of the Cyclones; rather, it's that we've become used to Keyspan and learned how the low minors work. A-ball is unsentimental: Each summer brings an entirely new roster of players, most of them destined to be forgotten in short order. The successful ones vanish to higher affiliates; the unsuccessful ones vanish to civilian life. A favorite original Cyclone becoming a Cub part-timer? For the New York-Penn League, that's a success story.

But just as I was getting used to this idea, Pagan returned. The Mets reacquired him in a dog-and-cat trade in January 2008, and he went north from Port St. Lucie after Moises Alou pulled a muscle or contracted gangrene or got mauled by a mountain lion or whatever the heck happened to him that time. Finally in Queens where Emily and I'd always thought he'd belonged, Pagan impressed in his first few weeks, and fans in the bleachers honored him with a cute pantomime of angel wings. But his next few weeks were less impressive, and in early summer he fell on his shoulder in a game against the Dodgers and landed on the DL. Emily and Joshua and I saw him that July, in Brooklyn of all places. He was on a rehab assignment, and compared to his momentary teammates he looked old and unhappy. It was an unfortunate homecoming, one we were hesitant to even acknowledge.

Pagan never returned to active duty that season, and I thought that was the end of the story. But then this year, in mid-May, he returned again as one of the waves of Bison reinforcements. And tonight, finally, he was front and center, in a new park that consciously after Brooklyn's lost Ebbets Field.

As Greg and I noted, sitting together back behind the first-base line, the game seemed to be taking several weeks. Part of that was Oliver Perez being Oliver Perez, but a lot of it was dopey baseball, with the Mets and Diamondbacks one-upping each other's efforts to lose. Happily, it was a startlingly gorgeous summer night, one in which you look up at the night sky and around at the stadium and congratulate yourself for picking the perfect way to spend your evening, even if the pitching and the hitting and the managing down there aren't exactly the stuff of Ken Burns rhapsody. Justin Upton hit a stunningly long home run and the Mets mounted a satisfying flurry of offense, but soon the game was tied and the question was whose relievers would be worse at the worst time. Given recent events, it seemed likely that we'd soon be falling back on what a beautiful night it had been, with the less said about baseball the better.

But with one out in the eighth Clay Zavada — whose mustache and hair demand 70s wakka-wakka porn music and double entendres by way of accompaniment — walked Alex Cora, gave up a little parachute to Omir Santos and a solid hit through the hole by Angel Berroa. That brought up Pagan, who looked at a ball, fouled one off and then got a fastball from Zavada that was high and not particularly fast. He sent it deep into the left-field seats, one of those bolts that brings everybody with a modicum of baseball sense to their feet even before an irrelevant outfielder kicks helplessly at the grass. It was Pagan's first home run since July 2007, his first as a Met, his first grand slam ever.

As Zavada dispiritedly went to work on Luis Castillo we were all standing and cheering and yelling. Everybody wanted a curtain call, but I'm not shy to say I wanted it most of all. Heck, I'd only been thinking of something like this since the early days of the Bush administration. Pagan bounced up the stairs and pointed at the crowd, smiling hugely, and it was exactly like Emily and I had imagined it, in Coney Island once upon a time.

Other happy memories are to be found in the pages of 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.

If the Mets were the hero of an old-time serial, they'd arrive in the nick of time to shoot the dastardly villain and gallantly reassure the screaming girl tied to the tracks. And then they'd struggle with the knots and get a spur caught in the rail as the locomotive came around the bend.

Splurk! Ooogh, that was gross.

Tonight's game had been fairly entertaining, with various Diamondbacks and Mets aiming for the fences in a Citi Field that's seemed to shrink a bit in the humidity. But then Pedro Feliciano gave up a hit and in came Sean Green, inheritor of the hangdog role played to perfection in recent years by Aaron Heilman. Green hit a guy. Then he walked a guy. Bases loaded, nobody out, and Citi Field was a bowl full of mutter.

Except! Wait! Hard grounder to Murphy! He's got the ball! He's not pulling a Jeremy Reed! That guy's out! And THAT guy's out! Murphy is pumping his fist! HE IS FIRED UP! OMIR SANTOS IS FIRED UP! I AM FIRED UP! YOU ARE FIRED UP! WE ARE ALL FIRED UP! WE ARE NOT GOING TO LOSE THIS GAME! WE ARE GOING TO —

…oh hell, Green threw a wild pitch.

I believe it was approximately a million years ago that we won five in a row.

Greg and I are going tomorrow. If you're there too, look for us around the sixth inning, pulling the limbs off our Build-a-Bears in frustration. I think I'll name mine Sean Green.

Sean Green is not mentioned in 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. Though there is mention of Shawn Green, who also pretty much sucked. Buy it anyway, OK — it's an awesome book.

Let's have some fun out here! This game's fun, OK? Fun, goddamnit.

Crash Davis is a good source of advice in most situations, but his desperate cajoling of the down-in-the-mouth Durham Bulls was never more apt than this week. The Mets — by which I mean the corporation that employs a fair number of people including baseball players — kept doing awful things, until a wise fan reflexively shied from WFAN, SNY, the papers, Facebook, Twitter and water-cooler conversation. Meanwhile, the Mets — by which I mean the uninjured baseball players drawing major-league paychecks from that corporation — kept doing wonderful things, prompting hopeful fans to check their watches and see if it was game time yet. It was fun. But at the same time, well, goddamnit.

Heck, a fan could even dream: Sure, there were a lot of teams to jump over in the wild-card race. But there was still time to do that, and no team ahead of us with anywhere like the firepower of the Phillies, even before they added Cliff Lee. And little by little, the injury news was getting better. Jose and the Carloses and Gary and J.J. and Billy weren't back in the starting lineup or out on a rehab assignment, but they kept being sighted doing baseball-like things. Even the bad news — John Maine seeing Dr. Andrews, talk of microfracture surgery for Beltran — could be summed up as either be more of the same or still too theoretical to fret about just yet. It wasn't realistic to think of the Mets jumping over the Brewers and then the Astros and then the Braves and then the Marlins and then the Cubs and then the Rockies and then finally the Giants, but it was no longer insane. You could imagine a 7:10 p.m. start in mid- to late August that featured the Opening Day lineup, and fantasize about that lineup making up, oh, a game or so a week and then, somehow, playing in October. It took a decent amount of imagination and a fair bit of optimism, granted, but it could be done.

And so it was that we came to what not so long ago was an unlikely reality: The Mets finished a matinee and you were excited — even a bit giddy — that they'd play again, not in 2010 or tomorrow but that very evening.

I was happy for another reason: After more than a week away from home, I'd be on my own couch, with SNY. I'd done OK while off on my various journeys, sneaking listens to MLB At Bat in San Diego and bringing in the game on the iPhone up in Maine and having it in my headphones during lunch today, but catch-as-catch-can is wearying and inevitably alienating. It was a relief to fall into the old rhythms of 7:10 p.m. at home. Just as it was a relief that Omar Minaya was done apologizing, today's steroids relevations had nothing to do with our team, and the only thing to be determined was whether the Mets could actually complete a four-game sweep of the recently high-flying Rockies.

That they couldn't was disappointing but not … well, you know. The finale of a four-game series that's gone your way so far is always a bit of an odd experience: You want to win, of course, but you've already booked a good result, and that fourth game feels like you're asking the baseball gods for some extra on the side. And at least it was an interesting little game: Two young pitchers whom you came to admire for their poise and stuff while knowing that one of them was fated to hit the kind of fatal bump in the road that young pitchers so often encounter. The Mets didn't lose by much — Angel Pagan got a little too frisky on the basepaths in the first and wound up with Yorvit Torrealba sitting on top of him, short-circuiting a potentially profitable first inning, and then took an awkward route to Jorge De La Rosa's double in the seventh. It was cruel watching Fernando Tatis battling the odds in that inning: Baseball being baseball, his spectacular catch of Seth Smith's potential go-ahead double was naturally followed by his helpless observation of Clint Barmes's drive into the left-field seats and a near-miss of a Troy Tulowitzki drive off the wall. Fernando could dive, but it's not his fault he couldn't fly.

Meanwhile, I'd sunk rather comfortably into my routine, struggling to stay awake during the top of the ninth. I was sleepy, but I was also optimistic. The Mets were playing well. What was two runs? They could make that up and take the Rockies in extra frames. I knew they could. I was pretty sure they knew they could, too.

Alas, I settled in for a bit of an extended blink and the next thing I knew Bob Ojeda and Chris Carlin were talking about something other than a miracle finish. Ah well. As a singer might have said in a somewhat longer song, three out of four ain't bad. Besides, there'll be baseball again tomorrow. And baseball's fun, OK? Maybe we won't even need a goddamnit.

It's always game time between the covers of 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.

Are the Rockies batters muttering away their between-games wait by convincing themselves they had no chance no matter what they did since Johan was so on, or will Jim Tracy cheer up his charges by reminding them they were up against an offensive juggernaut?

“Fellas, forget it. You can't shut down an Angel Berroa in clutch situations. And Angel Pagan runs faster than the Acela itself. As for Cory Sullivan…hey, he told us he was coming to get us, so we shouldn't be surprised.”

The composition of Cora's Irregulars, as my partner calls them, has wandered ever farther from the beaten path, which is good since they've gone five games without taking a beating. Administering them is suddenly their preferred route, while all Colorado must look forward to on their jaunts to Flushing is the bus to LaGuardia.

How can you doubt a Mets team made up of so many proven commodities? On Thursday afternoon it featured:

• a first baseman who's been an old hand at the position for two months;

• a leftfielder who spent the first half of the season discovering the charms of Western New York;

• a rightfielder who may never be able to tell his grandchildren what it was like to see unintentional Ball Four;

• a centerfielder who, as his name would indicate, went through hell before becoming heaven-sent;

• and a former Rookie of the Year who has taken six years to overcome the sophomore jinx.

Omir Santos co-led this lineup in Met home runs with a half-dozen, which is OK since we don't much bother with home runs. We were without Luis Castillo, which, for the first time since he came here in 2007, seemed like a really bad thing. We were without Brian Schneider, which necessitated the callup of Robinson Cancel…whom I still confuse with Omir Santos.

Santana, seven innings, eight strikeouts, four hits, one walk…what are the Rockies supposed to do with that?

Pagan, Cora, Wright, Murphy, Francoeur, Sullivan, Santos, Berroa…one All-Star and seven secret weapons. What are the Rockies supposed to do with that?

For your between-games reading pleasure: 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.