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.

Welcome to Rainout Recall, a precipitation-precipitated post from the past designed to help soak up the baseball void left behind by bad weather. Tonight we travel back in time to I'd Be A Real Mess If We Were 9-3, originally aired April 18, 2006, when the surging Mets were making us dizzy with success and, because we're Mets fans, uncertainty.

***

For about 30, 40, maybe 50 minutes after last night's game, I swear to you I was as baseball happy as I've been in 20 years. And baseball happy, given my short slate of priorities, pretty much means happy.

No kidding, though. When the enormity of our five-game lead over frigging Atlanta sunk in, I became almost overcome with joy. It was nothing like I remembered since 1986.

This isn't me falling into the hated trap known as the memory hole. I leave that to the know-nothing Kens and Barbies who deliver highlights on TV, blatherers who waste radio airspace and general assignment reporters who write those worthless metro section “baseball fever has gripped the city!” stories. We know different here. We're the institutional memory of this franchise. We know that the convenient storyline, “It's been a sad state of affairs for Mets fans since 1986,” is specious. We know there have been winning seasons and playoff seasons and even a pennant season, that there have been victories that have warmed the cockles and cockles that have warmed to victories.

We know that. You know that. I know that. But here's what else I know:

The last time I felt the way I did last night had to be 20 years ago. This takes into account the extended stretches of satisfaction, excitement and dreaminess that have made me the fan I am today, the ones from 1988 and 1990 and 1997 and 1999 and 2000 plus a few others from less successful campaigns. Those were good. A few were breathtaking. But they weren't this.

The way I felt last night in the wake of beating the Braves was something else altogether. This was first place as a matter of course. This was taking it to a team that had taken it to us. This was having a masterful power-hitting first baseman slugging a huge home run for us, not against us. This was a rightfielder acquired from some distant precinct flourishing, not shrinking. This was a catcher who runs the game and a middleman who stops the bleeding and a closer who ends opponents' evenings and 200-game-winner Pedro Martinez being 200-game-winner Pedro Martinez after all these years.

These are the Mets of 2006. They are ours. OURS! And first place is OURS! Theirs by achievement, but ours by rightful inheritance. We're the caretakers of the estate. We watched after it as the Howes and the Cedeños and the Wiggintons and the James Baldwins overran it and infested it with futility. We've watched the Braves ransack it so many times that we've lost count. Finally we have some real hard-ass types to scare them off with pitchforks.

We're ten and motherfucking two. We're five games ahead of the whole pack of National League Eastern Division jackals. We're No. 1! We're No. 1!

Just like the '51 Dodgers, the '64 Phillies, the '69 Cubs, the '78 Red Sox, the '95 Angels…you get my point. This is why the euphoria only lasted 30, 40, 50 minutes, because I have no concrete evidence that it will continue tonight or next week. Watching Floyd leave with a pulled rib cage muscle and seeing no sign of Beltran actually put me in mind of another great first-place team, the 1972 Mets. Remember them winning anything? They got off to a 25-7 start, had a six-game lead in May and then everybody got hurt. They finished 83-73 and way back in third place.

I don't want to be the 1972 Mets. I don't want to be the 1969 Cubs. The weird part is I don't want to be the 1999 Mets, and if you know me at all, you know that I consider the 1999 Mets representative of all that was worth living for. I was never so wrapped up in a baseball season as I was in 1999. I never cared so much about a Mets team as I did in 1999. No club — no thing — ever lifted me higher or threw me to the ground harder with impunity than the 1999 Mets. That was a year when fate itself hung on every single pitch.

I don't want that out of 2006. I'm too far gone after 10-2. To wind up in a dogfight with the Braves for the division or somebody else for the Wild Card would be to descend from the mountaintop. I like it too much up here to ever leave.

I fear I've been spoiled. 1999 was the best year of my baseball life and I now consider it beneath me, beneath us. It was fine for then, but I've tasted a record-setting five-game lead after 12 games and I don't want to go back. I want a six-game lead after tonight. I can't bring myself to throw out numbers beyond that, but I want great, big stuff out of this season. We can be scrappy as all get out in getting to it, but I want 1986-scrappy, not nearly blowing a playoff spot in the last two weeks of September-scrappy.

So now I've set myself up for disappointment. Anything less than first place will be crushing. Anything that isn't built to an impenetrable lead and soon will have me on more pins and needles than I need. Anything that follows the path of the recent St. Louis Cardinals — stupendous regular season, postseason failure — makes the whole thing an awful, unfair tease. And if we do scale the highest of heights and plant a few flags? If we do win everything there is to win in 2006 and are celebrated justly for it? Then I just know something will go wrong in 2007 and it will be 1987 all over again and I'll be sad.

OK, this is sick, as is this: guilt. Guilt?! Guilt from what? I'm watching last night as Pedro is wriggling out of jams and Andruw Jones just misses with one into the wind and there's no Chipper in sight and somehow I'm thinking, “Well, the Braves didn't get the breaks. The Braves are undermanned. This isn't a true test of the Braves.”

Just lock me up now before I do harm to someone with that kind of thinking. The Braves are at a disadvantage? The Braves have injuries? Like we weren't physically to say nothing of mentally challenged when playing them series after series, year after year? They came out on the short end of a bad bounce or two? All balls have done in a thousand Mets-Braves games is bounce their way. I hate the Braves, so I know I can't possibly feel sorry for the second-least sympathetic organization in baseball.

What is it then? Is it that the Mets don't deserve happiness? That some other baseball team deserves it more? The Red Sox got theirs. The White Sox got theirs. You don't have to wait 80-90 years to get yours. Cripes, it's been 20 years! Isn't that enough?

As I'm peeling back the layers on this onion, I'm finding my problem is a mash-up of expectation, perception and defensiveness. Though I came of age when the Mets were good, I never expect something like a 10-2, 5 GA start out of them at any time since. But I have always perceived them to be capable, and I'm extremely defensive when somebody — friend or foe — tries to paint us as some kind of perpetual, congenital loser. When I hear other Mets fans say things like, “Whaddaya expect? We're the Mets,” I bristle hard. I expect better than that. I perceive us as not long-suffering (even though I have, in fact, suffered for long periods of time because of the Mets). I guess I consider the Devil Rays the exemplar of übercrappiness and we generally haven't been them. It's almost as if it's been good enough for me not to be Tampa Bay.

But the rest of the world doesn't see it that way and, as much as I hate to admit it, I do care what the rest of the world thinks. When we finish with records like last year's 83-79, I want to sprint into the streets and do a jig that screams, “We had a winning record!” But nobody cares. Nobody cared when we finished 88-74 in 1997. It set my soul on fire, but by 1998, the memory hole beckoned. “Mike Piazza turned the Mets into winners.” The dickens he did! (Sorry, Mike; we loved having you, but we didn't all-out suck when you got here.) I could have lived with improving incrementally, auditioning Aaron Heilman as closer, enduring the fits and starts of Mike Jacobs at first, but then they go and drop Billy Wagner and Carlos Delgado into our laps and I'm ebullient…until I wonder if that's somehow unfair because we spent money that a team like the Devil Rays doesn't have.

And my head goes round and round like this.

I worry that we won't win the next game. I worry that we'll win too many games. I worry that we won't win enough World Series. I worry that we've done something wrong to be doing everything so right. I worry about displaying an uncharacteristic sense of entitlement and then I worry that I don't think I deserve better and worry that that reveals something as self-destructive as excessive haughtiness would. I worry that my worrying will screw up a 10-2 start with 150 games to go.

Then I get down to worrying about the normal things a normal fan worries about, like injuries and age on the pitching staff and a thin bench and bullpen depth and whether hot starts by Lo Duca and Nady and Sanchez are going to last because if everything doesn't continue to be the festival of Our Lady of Perpetual Victory that it's been for all of two weeks, I just don't know what I'm going to do with myself.

Which is why I'm better off confining my thoughts to those 30, 40, 50 minutes after a big win when everything is perfect.

***

Mets Walkoffs picks up what has become a long-running cause (too long), lobbying for the Mets Hall of Fame to reopen its rusty figurative gates and make them literal.

When it comes to opening wax packs, Bluenatic is suddenly having a great summer of 1988.

And check out the all-around good work being done at Remembering Shea.

Those Staten Islanders sure are a cocky bunch.

Actually, that would be a gross generalization and probably inaccurate. I knew one guy from Staten Island in college and he seemed nice enough. I know one guy from Staten Island now — big Dave Kingman fan — and he's never struck me as over the top (except maybe in his fondness for Dave Kingman). And the patron saint of Staten Island sports figures, Bobby Thomson, is perhaps the most humble hero baseball has ever produced. In fact, he'd no doubt recoil at being called a hero.

But I encountered this one guy from Richmond County a few weeks ago, and he was raving about the season Jason Marquis, also of Richmond County, was having. As if his numbers couldn't speak for themselves, this Staten Islander had to burnish Marquis's credentials as such:

He's gonna beat the Mets when the Rockies come to New York.

That unnecessary boast has been on my mind ever since I heard it. I wasn't frothing for the Mets to take on a freshly minted National League All-Star, but something about the man's guarantee struck me as the wrong thing to say. It was hubris in a game where humility is far more helpful to your cause. It reminded me of the last Bar Mitzvah I attended, some cousin of mine from Massapequa in 1991. He taunted some Northern California relatives in his challah-slicing poem (don't ask*) that he'd be going to San Francisco in a few weeks to see “my” Mets sweep their Giants.

Their Giants swept his Mets. And our Mets went on to wander in the desert for the next six seasons.

My cousin from Massapequa. The guy from Staten Island. Will baseball fans ever learn it doesn't pay to imitate Joe Namath? That there are no sure things? That you don't write checks your ass has no way of knowing in advance whether it can cash?

Jason Marquis didn't pitch terribly Tuesday night, but his Staten Island lansman put the nahora on him. I don't know if that fellow (like my cousin and, come to think of it, Jason Marquis) is Jewish, but he should have said, “You'll see Jason Marquis and maybe he'll do all right, kinahora,” which is what we say in Yiddish or at Citi Field to ward off evil spirits. It certainly worked for me, sitting and rooting humbly in the Left Field Landing Tuesday night.

Beat an All-Star pitcher with a lineup wherein that All-Star pitcher could easily bat sixth? Why wouldn't we be humble?

Sorry Marquis, you were doomed by the hubris of one of your friendly neighborhood boosters. And the Mets…the new, improved and humble Mets…they won their fourth in a row after no one in his or her right mind was boasting about their chances.

How do we proceed from here in the Wild Card race where the odds against us are as long as the Verrazano and our prospects still distressingly narrow? Stay humble, keep a low profile and hope for the best. Kinahora.

*It occurs to me it was the candle-lighting that brought out the poetry, not the challah-slicing. If it was the bread that had to wait for 64 couplets on the Bar Mitzvah experience, it would have gone stale.

More baseball advice you might find as not so awful: Get 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.

First of all, let's make something clear: Greg and I have never lobbied Omar Minaya, Jeff Wilpon or anybody else in the Mets organization for the job of bringing Mettle the Mule back to life as a clever, two-person costume. For Omar to insinuate otherwise in a press conference is despicable, and we're not sure how we'll be able to blog about the Mets given what's happened. Also, the new GM should listen to the doctors and figure out how to manage a roster. Thank you.

The annual summer trip to my folks' hilltop cottage in Maine is always a place to take stock of a couple of things: the march of technology and the state of the New York Mets.

Technologically, we've from dial-up Internet to cellphones that don't particularly work very well, from snowy rabbit-ears reception to post-digital-transition converter boxes. The rule for years has been that WFAN doesn't come in until after dark, so games get joined around the sixth inning. This isn't to mock the summer house for being backwards — rather, it's to note that here, technology assumes a back seat for a few days to reading books, picking blueberries and just sitting. Which, at least for a while each summer, is how it should be.

As for the Mets, well … Maine has rarely been kind to them. There have been dismemberments by unlikely Pittsburgh Pirates and other disasters I can't summon up for linkage because I'm on dial-up, but remember as a vague ache and bedrock sense of wariness.

This year, it seemed, things would be different. There's now a big AT&T cell tower on a neighboring hilltop (invisible, happily), so my cellphone reception is an order of magnitude better than it is in, say, Brooklyn. And with MLB At Bat, the sundown rule was repealed: WFAN was just one of 30 radio feeds I could listen to if I so desired, day or night. And the Mets? They'd acquitted themselves admirably down in Houston.

But something about the piney woods just spells embarrassment for my team, it seems.

I followed Tony Bernazard's long-awaited comeuppance via Twitter, with fellow faithful giving me the news 140 characters at a time. (This is me, by the way.) Press conference at 3:30 pm. Something big. Ah, Tony B. was out. Good. Now he'd have to abuse people who weren't college-aged prospects or below him in the office hierarchy — people who could fight back, and hopefully would. I hope Willie Randolph danced in a hallway and then tore his shirt off in celebration.

I tweeted that being a Mets fan had just become slightly less embarrassing, and headed out to do errands with my dad. On the way back, I pulled out my phone and punched up Twitter. What the hell? There was Steve, suggesting I reconsider the lack of embarrassment. There were Zoe and Caryn and Will and Vaccaro and Heyman and lots of other Mets- and sports-related folks. The iPhone was practically red-hot processing it all.

I pieced it together one bite-sized chunk of disbelief at a time. Yes, Bernazard was out. Omar had offered some nonsensical blather about the Mets' HR folks looking into the situation even before Adam Rubin's scathing stories in the Daily News; seeing how that was coming from the Mets' front office, I dismissed it as nonsense. But there was more. Much more. Omar had called out Rubin in the press conference, all but accusing him of having it in for Tony and lobbying the Mets for a job. Rubin, rightly indignant at being bullied from the pulpit, had sent both barrels back Omar's way. “Despicable,” he called the GM's behavior, and properly so.

My mouth was hanging open. Omar Minaya, who could at least be relied upon to shield his many failings with a veneer of plastic professionalism, had apparently lost his mind. The Mets had fired someone who richly deserved it, and even that had become an utter fucking farce. The Twitterers' heads were spinning. Over at Metsblog, you could tell Matt Cerrone was pinching himself between increasingly unlikely updates.

For a split-second I ached to be in New York, monitoring all this firsthand.

The last couple of seasons have shown us — in excruciating detail — that nothing said by any member of the Mets' baseball operations should be taken at face value. The team that takes the field each night is too often a shambles, with players who should be on the DL active but unavailable and the bench and/or pen painfully short. Obvious roster moves aren't made, aren't made in a responsibly timely fashion, or are leaked to the papers and then not made anyway. (Spare a moment of pity for poor Tim Redding.) Injuries are habitually misrepresented, leaving you to wonder if the team employs incompetent doctors or ignores the advice of competent ones. And, as we now know, the VP of player development bullied prospects, campaigned for the ouster of one manager while fraternizing with another, abused clubhouse guys doing their jobs, screamed obscenities at deputies in public and nearly came to blows with players on buses.

And an organization with this shoddy, sorry track record attacks Adam Rubin? It wasn't exactly hard picking whom to believe, and whom to side with. It is indeed despicable to attack someone for doing their job when the real issue is you not doing yours, and classless to try and use the trappings of your office to intensify the attack. I've never had reason to doubt Rubin's reporting; on the other hand, I've had reason to doubt Omar Minaya's competence — and now his truthfulness — night after night after night.

I've written before that the barrage of injuries to high-profile Mets would probably save Omar's job when he deserved firing for a lot of other sins. But yesterday changed that. If he lost his cool up there, that's a straw that ought to break the camel's back and result in his own firing in short order. If, on the other hand, he trained his guns on the Daily News on the orders of ownership, he ought to quit posthaste for the sake of his own honor. (Jeff Wilpon's presence as Omar kinda sorta apologized — and promptly got undermined by his boss — makes me as suspicious as it does Greg.) If that's what happened — and I really hope it isn't — the Wilpons need to think very seriously about what measure of blame they deserve for the dysfunctional disaster their team has become. Whatever the case, the very culture of this organization is fundamentally broken, and everybody that's part of it needs desperately to look in the mirror and ask hard questions about why and what needs to be done about it.

That was a lot of rage to boil down to 140 characters. So I fired off this Twitter update: “Does any #Mets fan believe anything Omar Minaya says? Fire him too, right now. What an absolute f—— disgrace this team is.” I offered much the same on Facebook. And then, looking out at the Maine woods, I realized I didn't want to be in New York. In fact, I was thoroughly and heartily glad that I wasn't. The turkeys were crossing the meadow again, and I wanted to see if I could get a short video of them. Perhaps the fawn and his mother would emerge from the woods once more. A front had rolled through, promising a beautiful sunset. Maybe there would be fireflies.

Ah, but there was a game to be played. And Cora's Irregulars had shown some admirable fight these last two days. Mets back at home, against the wild-card-leading Rockies. And, more basically, a summer night with baseball to be played. Time to fire up the iPhone and get Howie and Wayne on the line.

The game started. The Mets fell behind. I was still fuming. And then, little by little, the anger seeped away.

We had dinner. Joshua was put in the bath and put to bed. We washed up. Did the usual things of a vacation night, as the sun went down (beautiful as hoped for) and the night came up, the wood thrushes' calls giving way to the tap-tap of insects against the porch screen. And all the while, the game was unfolding a pitch at a time, obeying the usual rhythms of baseball on the radio at night, heard through the doorway and amid the scuffling of chairs and the clink of gathered silverware. Called strike threes. Pitchers looking in for signs. Long drives, but playable.

Hey, I thought, they're only two runs down. Let's go, boys! And then a short sharp rally to even things at three, and then another one to threaten the Rockies' pen and bring up the prospect of K-Rod coming in for the save. In the Maine night, my thoughts had turned from the mess of the afternoon to the age-old conundrum of whether Daniel Murphy should bunt the runners over or swing away. He bunted and Jeff Francoeur was walked and Cory Sullivan gave way to Fernando Tatis, last year's inspiring story turned this year's tale of frustration. Tatis fell behind 0-and-2, and the mind turned to Omir Santos and whether he could shake a little more magic out of his bat. Except then Tatis was swinging from his heels and the ball was flying and it was GONE and Fernando was floating around the bases, fist in the air, and the roar of the crowd was a joyous crackle fighting its way out of the iPhone's pinprick speakers, and I wasn't thinking about Omar Minaya or Tony Bernazard or Jeff Wilpon even the littlest bit.

The intrinsic beauty and joy of the game of baseball is asked to redeem a lot about the sorry and ugly business of baseball. Sometimes the asking seems like too much. But incredibly and improbably, baseball often manages to pull it off. Nothing about the Mets' team coming back to beat the Rockies makes the Mets' organization less of a mess. But for three hours, somehow, the Mets made me forget about the Mets. And for that I'm grateful.

Someone grabbed the last copy of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets? Rip off your shirt and challenge him to a fight, right now. Alternately, it's available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or another bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

“You again?”

“C'mon, let me in.”

“You're not on the list.”

“I can't get on the list unless you let me in.”

“Then you're not getting in.”

“Check it again.”

“I've checked it every day for weeks. You're not on it.”

“Take a closer look…toward the bottom.”

“Sigh, all right…name again?”

“I told you: Mets. New York Mets.”

“Is that with an 'N' or an 'M'?”

“Last name Mets. M-E-…”

“No. Not here.”

“Look all the way down. I should be there. I really should.”

“Buddy, there are seven lines here on this page, your name isn't on any of them.”

“Is there a second page?”

“Why would we need a second page? This is a very exclusive establishment.”

“Could ya check? Would it really hurt to check?”

“There's never a second page.”

“Maybe there is now.”

“Sigh, will you go away and leave me alone if there isn't?”

“Yes, I swear.”

“All right, but it's useless, we never have…hey!”

“What?”

“I'll be damned. There is a second page. What's your name again?”

“I told you: Mets. New York Mets.”

“You're the New York Mets?”

“Yes! I've been trying to tell you I'm on there. I'm supposed to be inside.”

“Inside? You?”

“That's right. Why do you sound so surprised?”

“No offense, pal, but you?”

“What do you mean 'you?' Are you this rude to all your clientele?”

“Well excuse me, but it's hard to think of you as someone who belongs in this club. I mean look at ya. You've obviously been through hell.”

“You're pretty judgmental for a bouncer.”

“You bounced yourself. Your second baseman dropped that pop fly, didn't he?”

“Old news. He's batting over .300 and on base almost .400.”

“That rightfielder of yours loses balls in the lights.”

“He's also got 14 RBI in 12 games for us.”

“Your first baseman's got zero power and he's batting cleanup.”

“And with him there we're talking 9 runs a game.”

“Two games!”

“Our last two games!”

“And that starting pitcher you used yesterday. He can barely get out of the first inning.”

“But he does. And then he keeps going.”

“You ain't much to look at, chief.”

“Says you.”

“Says me? Says the standings! It took me to the second page to find your name on here, and I'm not even sure why it's on here.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“C'mon. I know you're trying to impress somebody, but 7½ back?”

“With 66 to play…”

“You're not that close.”

“I've been farther back. I could tell you some tales that would make your hair stand up.”

“I've heard it all before.”

“Mine are doozies. I was way back a couple of times and you wouldn't believe what I did.”

“I don't need to hear your whole life story. All I know is you got a whole page of Wild Card contenders in front of you.”

“Lemme see that page!”

“Hey! Mitts off the clipboard! Only I can touch the clipboard!”

“Well, you touch your clipboard and go back to that first page and tell me who's better? I mean really better?”

“They're all better than you. That's what the standings are for: to tell everybody who's better than everybody else. And I got a sheet of paper that says seven teams are ahead of you — substantially.”

“They're not so great. Not one of 'em's a worldbeater. Not one of 'em I can't take if I put my mind to it.”

“But seven of 'em?”

“That's today. What about next week?”

“What about it?”

“I got time. I'm just getting my act together. I'm gonna be big soon. You'll be sorry if you don't let me in. I've got people in there.”

“People? What people?”

“Top line on your first page. The Colorado Rockies.”

“What about 'em?”

“I've got an appointment to see 'em.”

“You? What business do you have with the Wild Card-leading Colorado Rockies?”

“Me and them, we're playing four games, starting tonight.”

“So?”

“So I put it in a good showing, I ain't 7½ back no more. I'm closer.”

“Not that much closer.”

“How do you know?”

“If you were gonna get that close, wouldn't you already be closer?”

“I got time.”

“Not that much.”

“I'm tellin' ya, I do. This one time, I was 10 back, and it was even later than it is now. Nobody thought I had a chance. And this other time, they had me buried. You gotta believe me.”

“And ya came back…”

“Damn straight I came back! Over five teams! If there'd been more in my way, I'da come back over them, too!”

“Uh-huh.”

“It's true. I did it before. I can do it again.”

“There's nothing about you these days except for two good games to tell me that's true.”

“Ah ha! You admit it!”

“Admit what?”

“That I just played two good games. I played a good one Saturday and another one Sunday.”

“It's only two good games.”

“Yeah, but it means I'm hot. I'm hot at just the right time. And I'm hot just when the guy I gotta take down is here. I can take him down.”

“Listen to you. You're pathetic. You think you're gonna take down the Rockies just 'cause you beat the Astros twice? You're still not ahead of the Astros. You're not gonna be ahead of the Rockies no matter what ya do these next four.”

“I'll be closer. That's the important thing. I just gotta get a chance in there.”

“Somebody else'll be ahead of you. Somebody else'll always be ahead of you.”

“Now, maybe, but not next week. Or the week after. I gotta start somewhere.”

“You shoulda started earlier.”

“I know. I know I made some mistakes.”

“You made some whoppers. You had plenty of chances.”

“That was before. This is now. I'm hot, I'm tellin' ya. I'm ready. I got people in there. I got the Rockies. I can take 'em, but ya got let me in.”

“I don't know…”

“C'mon pal, one more shot. One more chance. That's all I ask. Let me in there. Let me in and I get on that first page on your clipboard. I can make my move. I can feel it.”

“I could get in trouble…”

“No trouble. Nothin' wrong here. I'm supposed to be in there, I swear it. C'mon buddy, give a guy a break. Just unhook that velvet rope for me. Lemme get in there so I can play the Rockies like it matters. Lemme in and there and maybe I can make it matter. I'm not ready to turn around and call it a year. I'm just not.”

“Sigh. All right, pal, I'll let ya in. I like your persistence, and that stuff about being buried before and coming back.”

“Thanks pal! Thanks!”

“But this is your last chance, you got me? You and the Rockies, for four. But I'm warning you, you better not blow these the way you blew whatever chance you had before.”

“I won't! I won't! You won't be sorry you let me in.”

“No, I'm almost positive I will. But I'm a sucker for a happy ending.”

Endings, happy and otherwise, fill 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.