Friday night was about taking the first steps from a state of shock to a sense of tentative acceptance. Sunday (the workout opened to planholders; Stephanie and I went courtesy of a very thoughtful planholder) was for the journey from bottom to top, front to back, side to side, ins and outs. Maybe.

I say maybe because no matter how much we looked around in blessedly brilliant sunshine, it's going to require a long journey for Citi Field to go from house to home. House is a structure, home is a feeling. One of the most unsettling moments of the long Mets fan winter that is scheduled (weather permitting) to end Monday afternoon at 1:10 was a press conference I caught on the MLB Network announcing the Red Sox' re-signing of Kevin Youkilis. Youkilis said something about how this was home. He meant the Red Sox, but the event was taking place inside of Fenway Park. You know Fenway Park is home of the Red Sox. It's the same home of the Red Sox that's been for almost one hundred seasons. When John Updike passed away during the offseason, we all thought about “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” highlighted by the timeless description of the lyric little bandbox. Fenway was as recognizable in the mind's eye and on Yawkey Way in 2009 as it was in 1960 as it was, presumably, in 1912. It may lack those all-important amenities we hear so much about, but you know what Fenway Park is. Red Sox don't have to think about whether or not they're home.

Shea Stadium was that to me and to us. Shea Stadium was the home of the Mets. It's torn down, but that feeling doesn't demolish easily. At one point on our extended tour this afternoon, we wandered into Caesars Club (nice of him to have us) and out those arch windows was the pile of rubble, a little less high than Friday night, I swear. Shea Stadium is, as promised, transforming into $18 parking spots. Last year I sat in Shea Stadium and watched where I was today take shape. Today I sat in a plush chair in a commodious lounge and watched where I was all my yesterdays. That asphalt was center field, wasn't it? Wasn't Carlos Beltran just taking a home run away from Ryan Ludwick down there? Isn't that where I saw every centerfielder from Agee to Cameron before him ply his craft? Center field at Shea Stadium could be an adventure. Adventureland was now pavement.

I stopped looking at the past. I tried to look ahead. But baseball isn't just one long scouting report, one massive volume of Baseball Prospectus. I care deeply about how the Mets will do before every game and every year but I realize I care less and less about season previews and projected records and all that crystal ball gazing as each April arrives. What'll happen happens. I've guessed right sometimes. I've guessed wrong plenty. I guess I'll find out for sure about the 2009 Mets starting very soon, and Citi Field soon after that.

I'll stand by my delight from Friday about the concourses and the culinary options (Shea specialized in discomfort food, literally and figuratively) and all those upgrades that were injected into the new park. I miss the soul of Shea Stadium, but its infrastructure you can keep. Yet that soul…that'll take a while to rebuild over here. As Stephanie and I compared notes on how this felt like Busch, like the Jake, like Great American, like Miller Park — “And the nicest part of all, Val…I look just like you,” as it was put in that Twilight Zone in which everybody was subject to mandatory plastic surgery — I realized what I really wanted was the Citi Field modernity as I walked around and then I wanted Shea Stadium to open up before me as I sat down. Can't have both, apparently.

A friend once told me a story of a coat he wore for many winters. It was red, white and blue, so his buddies called it his Captain America jacket. He grew less and less amused over time and, come one Christmas, he asked his folks for a new winter coat. Whaddaya need that for? his practical dad demanded. The one you have still fits.

“I'm tired of the Captain America jacket,” my friend insisted. And for Christmas, he got something less comical to wear for warmth.

I can understand the impulse for a new coat — but I've been cloaked in the same forest green parka for a decade because it still fits. Shea Stadium still fit me no matter that others swore we'd outgrown it. I wish it were still here every bit as much as I hope its successor wears well. I see no point in indulging my instinct for Sheadenfreude. I can't root for this new place to not work. It's not going to do me or us any good. And whatever flaws emerge in these coming months aren't going to bring Shea Stadium back from lot to life.

Every time SNY has had a spare hour, it's replayed the Shea Goodbye ceremony from September 28. When it's on, I stop and watch. It occurred to me a few weeks ago that this is akin to viewing a funeral over and over and over again (luckily, they don't show the fatal car wreck of a game that preceded it). I can't help but look. It's the last time Shea Stadium stands. After Seaver and Piazza close the gates and Aaron Copland celebrates the common man, there's no more Shea. I like having the last of it in living color, but I hope they stop showing it. I don't want to be drawn into a funeral procession any longer. I can miss it without mourning it.

When I lost the first pet that ever died on me, as an adult, I was beside myself with grief. I asked a friend who'd had a cat learning curve similar to mine — not converting to felinism until his thirties — how he coped when he lost the kitty he loved.

“You mourn, but then one day you just stop,” he said. “It's a cat.”

I got it. And eventually I stopped mourning. Never stopped missing, but I moved on. Today I began to move on from mourning Shea. I miss it, but I'll keep moving forward. I have to.

Mourning has broken.

***

In a recent episode of The Simpsons, Lisa frets over what kind of candy to buy to impress a new classmate. “How about Charleston Chew?” Bart asks.

“What is this,” Lisa huffs. “Brooklyn in the Fifties?”

No matter the cynical conception that METS stands for nothing more than My Ebbets Team Substitute to a certain majority owner, Citi Field feels nothing like I imagine the joint on McKeever Place did. You can have your archways and your Rotunda (I can't look at that 42 sculpture and not think “Ron Hodges”), but that's where it ends. I don't mean that to let Citi Field off the hook for its overly nostalgic tics. I mean this ain't some lyric little bandbox. You wouldn't build Ebbets Field in this day and age any more than you'd build Shea Stadium. It can pay all the homages it wants and it's not going to be from 1913 or serve as a chummy little neighborhood asylum. It's too now, it's too affluent (or would be in better times). That's OK. There's a reason a team once left Ebbets Field that has nothing to do with Robert Moses. It was no longer considered an optimal business model.

This is not Brooklyn in the Fifties. Does it carry on the intangibles of Ebbets, though? Is it “intimate” as billed? Well, it's smaller than Shea, as you well know. There are spots from which you're sitting far from the field and you don't feel on top of the action as promised. There are spots (probably ones I won't be sitting in again when it's not an open house) where you feel cut off from baseball civilization. And then there are spots that give you the impression they weren't kidding about intimacy.

The Pepsi Porch feels that way; we were in right, but I was tempted to shake hands with whoever was sitting on a line with us in left. Midway up the Promenade on the third base side feels that way, too. It's a new, improved Upper Deck over there, at least until you climb to the top (when it's just a very high and windy perch). The tilted seats make their most impact up there, I thought. I am so used to staring at the left fielder from that vantage point that it will actually take practice to not turn my head toward Daniel Murphy and just stare straight at the batter…but what's attending a glorified batting practice for anyway?

It was at those two random sit-downs when I felt like I might enjoy watching a Mets game at Citi Field, that it won't feel foreign. The Prom was ballpark seating like I was used to, but properly aligned. The Porch doesn't feel as far away as other outfield seats I've tried in other places. That could be fun. Even though a revisit to the Field Box level (as opposed to Field Level boxes of yore) was pleasant, that's the part where I felt we were in Anypark, U.S.A. And a brief sampling of the Caesars level was too exclusive for my tastes. A great, great vista, with a guest appearance by Flushing Bay in the distance, but isolated in its splendiferousness. If I want privacy, I can sit here at my computer. Ballparks are public spaces. The Mets' public (even if I've had my run-ins with disreputable representatives thereof) needs to be bonded together.

I gotta hand it to the Mets for having this housewarming, as my friend Sharon called it. Sure it was an excuse to sell stuff (nobody forced me into that team store or toward the Catch of the Day counter, so I'll forego restating my astonishment at the price tags) and a fourth chance to flick the switches on and off so they operate properly a week from Monday, but it was simply lovely to be among Mets fans again. I don't think it's fair to identify any subset as “the real fans,” but the partial people strike me as particularly committed. They'd have 81 tickets every year if time and money weren't issues. They have made an annual habit of every Saturday or every Sunday at a Mets game (though I understand that the Mets rejiggered weekends to include spare Wednesday nights this year). These people wandering and noshing and taking in a slice of BP weren't from some elite superstrata of the population. They were Mets fans who would have gladly gone to watch batting practice at the old ballpark and seemed just as pleased to have it presented to them at the new venue. Maybe some of them were the people I saw lingering atop the Upper Deck ramp the last Sunday of last September, not wanting to give up what was so familiar and reassuring. I hope those ramp people, wherever they were today, are happy in the new digs. I hope they find it to be home.

I hope I do, too. I had a great big head start this morning and afternoon being there with Stephanie. Finally finding, after ten minutes of searching, the brick that commemorates our first date reminded me how happy I was to begin to share my passion with my then newly beloved. Our visit later to the Caesars seats brought me back to that August day in 1993 against the Rockies when we had a similar view from Loge: right behind the plate, the Mets in the foreground, us together. That was then. That was now, too.

Shea La Vie — and Citi Field while we're at it.

The end of Shea Stadium and the fanwalk that brought us there is retraced 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.

…from Game 3 of my Getting Acquainted With It tour was this: There wasn't any particular news.

OK, there were a couple of new things I found out. I exited down the ramps in the left-field corner and found them a pleasant surprise — you zig-zag ever downwards, the light filtered by the big sepia banners that were my first happy glimpse of Met history at the new place, accompanied by the giant faces and numbers of David and Jose and Keith and Tug and others. Confronted by a Shake Shack line that fazed even me, I had the Danny Meyer tacos and they were fantastic. I skipped the insane line at the Jackie Robinson Rotunda for the nonexistent one at the Swoboda Gate and decided that from now on this was my entry point to the park. So there were a few more notes to scribble in my Citi Field ledger for next time.

But that was about it — I didn't have another Come to Jesus moment at a concession stand, though those carnitas did renew my faith in a higher culinary power, or revel in additional legroom, though I did start to wonder when I'll break the Shea-style habit of sitting with my feet scrunched under me. And that lack of big moments is for the best. Because what I spent a lot of time doing Saturday afternoon was … watching a baseball game. And while ballpark eats and explorations are fun, particularly for a man on the brink of 40 with a six-year-old son who's not always going to be gripped by impassioned explanations of who should be the cover man, ultimately the game's the thing. And in Game 3 the game pushed its way back to the head of the line.

Unfortunately, the game was a fairly rude arrival. Emily likes to call Oliver Perez the girl with the curl, and today boy was he ever horrid. No life on the fastball, no sense of the strike zone, no inkling of the wisdom to wait a moment while Luis Castillo and Jose Reyes sorted out who was covering second, and no mercy from Jed Lowrie. Exit Ollie to midseason-form boos, enter worry and fuming: Next time they have the fucking WBC, if Omar lets ANY fucking Met play I'm going to TP his fucking house. Fucking Teddy Higuera, not answering his cellphone and pitching our fucking crucial third starter twice in 19 fucking days. Fucking Oliver! Fucking WBC! Fuck we are FUCKED! You'll note there wasn't anything about Danny Meyer or seat angles in that pungent little reflection. And that's as it should be.

Sitting in the Excelsior level (which still sounds like it should be somewhere between the Valhalla and Excalibur levels, but we'll get used to it) just behind Daniel Murphy, my friends Chris and Peggy and I had a pretty good view of the proceedings, though the left- and center-field warning tracks were mysteries requiring a turn to glance at one of the several nearby HDTVs. And as the Mets spotted the Bosox an Alfonsecan handful of runs and then fell further behind, we compared notes on how the new park seemed to play.

* Like there's very little foul ground behind the catcher, and balls come back off the brick hard. The Melvin Moras and Kevin Mitchells of alternate Met universes please take note.

* Like those outfield walls are high, and have already cost Fernando Tatis and Jeremy Reed home runs. I'm sure the Lost Met Home Runs count will start up in the Post or the Daily News any day now. It'll be interesting to see if the top panels in left and center come down and the orange lines (still weird to the eye) get drawn lower in 2010.

* Like those walls and the Moddell's gap in right-center will produce a lot of triples. David Wright may not have quite as many highlights in Citi Field at first, but Jose Reyes seems assured of an additional share.

I'll be happy to not miss a pitch on the scoreboard obverse (working today) while Joshua plays Wiffle Ball or I'm in line for something I couldn't have had at Shea. I want to hang out during a cool summer evening at one of the picnic tables in the Keyspan-style plaza that sits atop the rotunda. I want to find a great vantage point from which I can look out over the field when I arrive late or when I can't bear to take myself home just yet. But most of all, when I'm at Citi Field I want to watch the Mets. Doing that will make the new place home more than any kitchen wizardry or traffic planning will. And today that's what I started to do again.

You can't watch the Mets Sunday — and Monday looks pretty dicey too — so why not watch the words go by in Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets. You can order FAFIF: AIPHOTNYM from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or find it at a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

“You like it?”

“Yeah.”

“Good, 'cause we live here now.”

—Danny Tripp and Matt Albie, Studio 60 pilot

1) Shock

The first song to come on my iPod on the 5:11 to Woodside was Carly Simon's “Anticipation”. It was a coincidence, I swear.

Anticipation. Not dread. Anticipation. I was excited when I left the house just before 5:00. I was excited in June of 2005 when the go-ahead was given for what would become Citi Field. I hid it well since its design was unveiled in April 2006 because I had dreamer's remorse, but I stayed, in my own way, authentically anticipant.

Second story of the week from that trip to Milwaukee two years ago. We took a bus to get around the city, which was fine, except for one leg of the journey for which I miscalculated the distance between the bus stop and our hotel. We got off in what would objectively be viewed as a not great part of town. We're walking around in our touristy state and feeling quite out of place. Maybe we were in absolutely no danger, maybe we weren't technically lost (Milwaukee's too efficient a city for that), but we definitely weren't where we needed to be. We weren't feeling too good about our predicament as the sun set and a way out seemed miles away.

Two thoughts crossed my mind as we walked and got no closer to our destination.

• If something happens to us, the cats are boarding at the vet — what will happen to them? My sister's the emergency contact and she freaks out when one of them does as much as arch his back.

• If something happens to us, I'll never get to see Citi Field.

Note that in my moment of panic, I didn't think “I'll never sit in my beloved Shea Stadium again,” but rather I worried that the pile of bricks rising next door would go up without me, that I would be cut down going from second to third before I could see what was going to be my team's new home. I'd seen Shea, by then, more than 300 times. Nobody had seen Citi Field.

(Oh, we hopped another bus and eventually made it back to our hotel, in case you were wondering.)

I waved the Shea banner high and proud and, ultimately, sadly because it deserved to be waved for all that its 45 seasons had given us and given me. But for all my precautionary kvetching and moaning, I never didn't want to see the Mets play baseball in Citi Field as long as that was where they were headed.

Yet when the moment arrived for me to see the Mets in Citi Field on April 3, 2009, I was almost too shocked to get that it was going on.

It was around 103rd Street, en route on the 7 from Woodside, that I got up to find a window at which to stare at the scene I knew was waiting: a clear shot at Citi Field. Absolutely nothing in the western foreground. Shea a pile of rubble, Citi up and at 'em. Me and another guy, a fellow traveler. We both stood and stared. We looked at each other. We agreed we didn't know what to say.

Next stop Mets/Willets Point, whatever that was.

Down those installed-in-2008 stairs and…boom. Shock. A plaza. And behind it, a stadium. I mean a park. I mean a field. Whatever. It was the new home of the Mets. That's what the ticket Jason gave me said. I never looked at the tickets I had before to see if they said Shea Stadium. I just assumed they did.

What the hell is this place? I know what it is, I watched it from its environmental impact study infancy all the way to nearly complete. I studied every picture that every baseball-fever obsessive took all winter. I even sat down and focused on Mike Francesa's YES simulcast Friday afternoon because it was live from here and it was the first extensive televised look I'd seen.

But what the hell was this place?

The bricks…my brick. Our brick, make that. Suzan and Mark gave me a brick certificate for the birthday that followed my making fun of the whole commemorative brick initiative. But there I was filling it out on behalf of Stephanie and myself, and in the mail, a few weeks ago, came word that I could find the finished product in Section 11, last batch on the upper tier of bricks. So I sought to meet my brick before introducing myself to my park.

I still haven't met my brick. It's out there somewhere, I'm sure. But forget about it. There's like 7,000 bricks per batch. They all seem to say LET'S GO METS, which is swell, except it's one large blur of team-first mentality, a whole lot of being true to the orange and blue in varying auburns and umbers. My sweet message about our first Shea date (METS 8, GIANTS 3 MAY 15, 1987) did not leap out. Maybe next time.

I'd read too many perspectives on Citi Field after the St. John's game. I'd examined too many photos. I knew too much going in. I sort of wish a tarp had been thrown over the whole thing and that it had been constructed in private. I knew too much, yet I knew I didn't know anything. A lethal cocktail.

Where do I go? Ticket says JRR, which has nothing to do with Jeff Reardon, Jerrod Riggan or Jason Roach, the only three Mets with the initials JR. No Met had a Rotunda built in his honor. Jackie Robinson's entryway was the first thing anybody told us about this place, back in '06. It indeed existed just as they said it would. It was right there for the inspiring but it was also backed up clear to (Jackie) Roosevelt (Robinson) Avenue with ticket holders. From all the reviews and pictures, I knew enough to bolt right.

The BULLPEN GATE beckoned. Gate BG, I suppose. I suppose not, actually*. The days of Gates with letters are over. Leave it behind, already yet. The Gates were the first elements of Citi Field to start winning me over this winter. On the LEFT FIELD gate, there was a silhouette of Endy Chavez leaping and catching. For the RIGHT FIELD gate, Rocky Swoboda, stretched out and catching. Two Silhouettes from the Shea. It gave me confidence that this wouldn't necessarily be Ebbets II, that the Jackie Robinson Rotunda and the Ebbets Club and that placeholder from the CGI featuring DUKE'S GRILL (though Snider was a Met, too) just combined for an opening salvo, something to talk about, like the inane chatter about seat cushion thickness they dealt us at the Citi Field Preview Center in Loge in 2007. The Mets would have Mets around, right?

Yes. Banners with faces in NY caps lined the walkway from the Rotunda to the Bullpen entrance. Not Giants, but not Dodgers either. Mets. Mets is all I wanted in this strange place. Mets is what I was beginning to get. It didn't seem possible that this was a Mets operation because they were doing something right after convincing me for the last few years they could do only wrong. They were honoring the Mets. It also didn't seem possible that there was no line at the Bullpen Gate and that they'd let me in without a hassle. (While I was calculating the odds that this would go smoothly, that I wouldn't be sent to the back of the Rotunda queue, some guy walked by and gave me a big “Faith and Fear! Keep up the good work!” So now I, too, was part of the Citi Field Experience.)

It was an operative gate, topped by a silhouette of probably Seaver, maybe Gooden, hard to discern inarguably. The security was quick, efficient and not offensive. In a moment, I was groped respectfully and directed up a brief flight of stairs and inside Citi Field.

Inside Citi Field.

I was in shock. Not awe, just shock. This is our ballpark? This, not Shea? This, not the Polo Grounds? This, not…I never pictured us anywhere else. I never saw the Mets in the Polo Grounds except on a plaque. I never saw the Mets play any home games anywhere but Shea. Which at the moment is rubble.

I was in shock.

I entered some concourse. I didn't know what it was leading me to. I glimpsed the field and the seats. I hoped to be blown away. I was blown away in Pittsburgh. I was blown away in Baltimore. I wanted to mutter to myself how great this was, how wrong I'd been for three years of nitpicking, that for all my odes to Shea and all my warnings against soulless corporate greed or whatever was bothering me for three years, I was wrong.

I wasn't blown away. I wasn't necessarily right that this was going to be missing something, but I couldn't tell yet. I was reminded, in a one-two punch of snap judgment, of Citizens Bank Park and Nationals Park. My very first glimpse of the new home of my Mets reminded me of two venues devoted to two rivals of my Mets. Fine parks both. Neither ever blew me away. And now we were the third in that line, already a game back in the parks department.

Damn.

I forgot about impressions and comparisons and just sought bearings. Where the hell am I? Oh right, the Mets game. The Mets game isn't quite starting yet, and it doesn't count in the standings, so I don't have to rush to my seat. I can walk around. So I did.

Where, I didn't know. I mean, yeah, I could see the field from out there in the outfield. I could put together the bridge in front of me with the bridge I'd seen on my computer. I could read the signs for the places with the food. WORLD'S FARE. (Cute, but why no 1964 motif?) Peckish and curious, I went in.

Quesadillas! And my Daruma! I love quesadillas, so I bought one. My fondness for Daruma is well-documented. I didn't really need their sushi anymore in the new order because I had quesadillas, whereas at Shea, it was me and Daruma against the world: only food I truly enjoyed there, so naturally I was barred from it more often than not by “policy”. For old time's sake, I bought the tuna rolls from Daruma. To satisfy my curiosity, I bought the quesadilla.

“Do you take credit cards?” I had to ask before taking possession. Of course they did. This is Citi Field.

The quesadillas were overpriced (everything was overpriced) but the first thing I ever ate at Citi Field was heavenly. It didn't last long. I wouldn't last long without a cash machine. Citi Field has those, too.

I placed the pre-packaged sushi in my schlep bag for later partaking (if anything, Daruma's grown dandier) and took off on a 360-degree tour. Just walked and watched, watched and walked. Stopped to witness the first pitch by a Met in Citi Field history (though it didn't count) and the first at-bat by a Met in Citi Field history (ditto). Otherwise I wandered and I lingered and I remained in shock.

Where am I?

2) Grasping

I had come into the park around Section 109 and my seats were in Section 109. These were exhibition-priced Field seats. They were, like the food, overpriced given that this didn't count, but Jason snapped them up, figuring they were a one-time-only opportunity to sit down here (even if the new Mets thing is to let us walk unfettered almost everywhere). I was surprised and delighted I could figure out how to find my seat immediately. I thought after a lifetime of nailing Mezzanine Section 7 and Upper Deck Section 23, that a new stadium/park/field would baffle me. It didn't. It was clearly marked.

I showed my ticket to a man at the top of the stairs of the section. He pointed me in the correct general direction. You mean no schmata preserved from George Weiss's private stash is going to follow me down the stairs to grunge up my seat in exchange for a dollar? You mean it? No ushers ushering! Hallefuckinglujah! This is a seat upgrade.

The playing was the thing for a bit. We watched some baseball while comparing notes and grasping what we were in the midst of. Where's the count? Is the out-of-town scoreboard functioning properly? Do you like the retired numbers looking as they did before? Where will the pennants hang? What's with the angles in the outfield? Why is the wall black? Who are those advertisers? What's that weird thing with the pizza boxes on the big screen? That would have been out of Shea.

Shea was never far from our thoughts. It's our only home park reference point to date, so it had to serve as straw man in every reflexive comparison. I don't mind telling you Citi Field was winning every informal battle by TKO. But this wasn't a competition and the scoring wasn't done viciously by either judge. Shea is now that mangy mutt who ate your shoes and left you a package you didn't order, but he's gone and now, for all his misdirected hijinks, you remember him honestly but fondly. A sub-theme of the evening emerged: Look how well this aspect of Citi Field works…remember how at Shea it didn't? It was inconvenient then. It's sort of sweet now that it's not bothering us.

I can't measure Shea the baseball pressure-cooker against whatever Citi will be when the heat is on in a big game because we have yet to see a big game here. Nothing counted Friday night except first impressions.

Among those impressions was they didn't lie about a couple of winning features. Big seats. Long leg room. You don't know how great that is until you've got it and recall how the mangy mutt you loved/tolerated bottled you up. I mentioned no ushers. I should also mention the nice young man who sold me my Diet Pepsi didn't take my cap away. And that a pretzel and a hot dog (because a quesadilla and a tuna roll weren't enough) were hot and fresh, not regrettable and maddening.

3) Exploring

The rain delay was the highlight of this Mets-Red Sox exhibition game. It gave Jason and me an excuse to stroll everywhere. Except for not being permitted to drag our wet selves into the Excelsior Club (in our Shea-conditioned minds, Field Level seats trump everything and thus double as backstage passes; at Citi, they don't), we loved everything we encountered. Citi Field is arranged to function as a very sociable place. Access may be restricted by ticket price and shortened supply but the place itself, inside, is very accessible. You can pick a spot and stand and do, as Larry David calls it, a stop 'n' chat. You can gaze out at the Queens that surrounds you from all kinds of intriguing vantage points when you're away from your seat. Stare south at the Unisphere and remember why they call that thing in the outfield WORLD'S FARE. Project east toward downtown Flushing and believe you can reach out over Little Albania and touch the U-Haul sign. The skyline of Manhattan twinkles to the West. LaGuardia's fun to watch beneath the northern sky. I don't care for being cut off from a view of the outside world at my seat, but I love the way the world is there for the taking in once you get up and walk around.

I also loved the sense that we — the fans, the staff, the media, the players a little bit even — are all in this together. Nobody knows anything yet. I'm clueless, but so is everyone else. We're learning this thing as a group. It's kind of fun to feel in the same boat.

It's also fun to see the old Apple. I never quite melted at the thought of it in Shea as some others did, but welcome to Citi Field, you big lug.

4) Absorbing

I thought the rain delay would become a cancellation, but the game came back, so we returned to our seats in 109. We were joined by my friend Gary and his wife Aneta (ah, the magic of the text) and, with many having cleared out from the storm, we had even more leg room. Gary was overwhelmed with joy at what he deemed a “palace,” taking to the organ accompaniment in particular (we call Gary “Jane” in deference to his Jarvisian keyboard skills). As play resumed, it wasn't so much a shockingly strange new place where we couldn't figure out where they posted the radar readout. It was “this is really nice, hey another baserunner.” Not a lot of people, a little tack-on rally, some cheering from the faithful…holy crap, it felt like a Mets game. It felt like one of those nights at Shea where you could lean back and enjoy the companionship of those you were glad to come with and delighted to bump into. Except here you could actually lean back.

Somewhere between the bases-loaded walk in the bottom of the sixth and Frankie Rodriguez's triumphant final strikeout in the ninth, I found myself thinking, without even thinking about it, “I want to come back.”

5) Reflection

I don't know that Citi Field is a particularly special pin on the ballpark map. It wasn't PNC or Camden. It doesn't have to be, I suppose. What it has to be is ours. It has to become ours, which will take a little time. Friday night shows me it has the potential to be a friendly place, a relaxed place, a place where we and the Mets fit in glove-like cohesion. How it acts with a fuller house and greater concentration and lots more drinking will help us understand what it means to be the home of the Mets from this moment on.

The prices are ridiculous. The prices were getting ridiculous at Shea for a long time. In 1977, M. Donald Grant justified the shunning of free agents to Sport magazine this way:

“The board discussed it and we thought it wasn't good for the fans. We don't think fans can afford it. if you continue to pay these prices, the fan is going to have to pay between $7 and $8 to get into the game.”

Somewhere Down There, the chairman of the board of Met Hell is having a good laugh. We sign free agents, we pay our players well, we tear down a stadium to replace it with a field and all $7 gets you is a little change for your frank. But at Citi Field, to a certain extent, you get what you pay for. The food is way better. The service is way better. The physical comfort is way better. The bathrooms, pending a mass run on beer, are way better.

Yet even as I couldn't see the world outside because of the way the park “envelops” you (Jeff Wilpon's phrase), I remembered on the train home there is a world out there and it's not doing so hot. Jason was a lower-case prince and treated me to my first game at Citi Field. That was $38 for a game that didn't count. I didn't keep track of my noshery bill, but the total spent was close to that figure (I don't plan to eat that well every trip in, but boy am I tempted). These are not throwaway figures in the course of an evening or a week or a season. What I am left to mourn of Shea Stadium is the way of life it represented before, during and, for a not inconsiderable period, after Don Grant. You could walk up and buy a pretty cheap ticket on no planning. You could buy four to bring your kiddies, bring your wife. It got more difficult as the years went by, but it was manageable. And you were guaranteed, in ways that counted, to have the time of your life.

In Citi Field, upstairs is filling in fast and first. When those cheapish seats are snapped up, your options ascend financially like one of those old World's Fair rockets. What was $38 in short right Friday night for an exhibition will be $75 for the proverbial weeknight against the Marlins by the end of this month. And that's the Value date. A Friday night against the Brewers in between? That's Gold, baby — Gold. That's sixty bucks in left field reserved. Per person. Never mind all your fancy sections that are beyond the means of most of us. That's absurd, and not in that Marvelous Marv Met sense of the word.

I didn't want to think about how much things cost at my first-ever game at Citi Field or how much they'll cost for the one after that and the one after that. But it costs a lot. Shea has Citi beat on that, even if all you paid for was baseball, crappy food and snarling personnel (or was it snarling food and crappy personnel?). The market will dictate whether these prices will hold, whether every Mets fan who wants to will or can go, whether they have to skip the quesadilla or whatever so they can handle the $18 parking. I hope something can be arranged and that those wide seats with loads of leg room don't go unoccupied. They deserve to have asses in them and legs unfurl from them, respectively.

It's a good park. It's a fine park. It's not a great park on first contact, but first contact is just that. It has running room. We will see how we interact with it, whether we spend so much time meeting and greeting and eating that we don't focus on the field and yell as we always did at Shea. But we're Mets fans. We'll figure it out.

Citi Field is a nice place to visit, which is good. 'Cause we live there now.

*Actually, no. I realized Sunday I entered through the RIGHT FIELD gate on Friday. Boy was I disoriented.

Thanks go out to Matt Silverman, the latest in an encouragingly long line of blolleagues to file an enthusiastic review of Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets. And he knows from Mets books. You can order FAFIF: AIPHOTNYM from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or find it at a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.

For those who wondered what would come first, the Mets playing in a new ballpark of their own or Gary Sheffield wearing a Mets uniform…it's a tie!

All-time reserve Never Met Sheffield has been signed. Unwanted elsewhere, unlikable in general, unskilled relative to what he was a few years ago, yet Doc Gooden's nephew (though they're practically the same age) is here until further notice. The roster will be readjusted ASAP, one presumes, with Nick Evans maybe taking the hit for now and Marlon Anderson drifting away days later. His next homer will be his 500th. We'll like him fine if he gets it.

I don't know if it's going to stop raining altogether tonight. I don't know that Sheffield isn't a waste of Major League minimum salary. But I do know that with Castillo, Hernandez and now this guy, we must lead baseball in 1997 World Champion Florida Marlins. World's longest-running fire sale, indeed.

You are more in need of a night in Atlantic City than any man I've ever met.

—Will Bailey, upon meeting an overwrought Toby Ziegler, The West Wing

I need a trip to the ballpark. Honest to god, I need a trip to the ballpark.

Have we got a ballpark? We do, don't we? It's not the same old ballpark that I loved. It's the gleaming new ballpark I'm only beginning to think about trusting. But it's the only ballpark we've got, so that's good enough for me.

I get my first genuine look at the new home of the New York Mets Friday night. By this time tomorrow, I could be affirming it is the greatest thing since sliced Shea. It will, by every informed indication, exceed its predecessor in form and function. It's up to me (and you and you and you and…) to give it a heart. I imagine we're up to the challenge.

In our final Shea trip together, Jason said to me that he'd walk over broken glass to watch the Mets, which was his way of declaring Shea Stadium, as much as he found fault with it, was better than nothing. Citi Field (brrr…what a crappy name after all this time) is more than a bag o' glass, to be sure. I may have hesitated to embrace it in its construction phase, but now that it's here and I'm going to be in it, it's going to be mine. It has to be. It's got the Mets.

And I need the Mets. I need the Mets to be not just some holding action in Florida, some place for WBC All-Stars to stow their stuff while they're off Representing Their Country. I need the Mets to get to a 48th season. I need the Mets to make history, not merely be history. I need something new to talk about. I'm the guy, it says in my book, who can talk about being a Mets fan all day and all night. At this moment, I'm not interested in talking about being. I'm frothing to be doing. What I'm going to be doing, under the familiar threat of Flushing Meadow weekend rain, is going to the ballpark Friday night to see the Mets.

It will feel good, even if it doesn't count.

***

Thanks to the Faith and Fear devotees who took themselves out to Varsity Letters Thursday night to spend quality time chilling with/listening to Jason and me. We got to meet some fine folks, renew some great acquaintances, hear three other wonderful authors (one poetic Met, one soulful Yank, one odd man out) and cap the offseason in undeniably unique fashion. Thanks to the organizers, too, for having us on the bill. Will notify all here of other, hopefully geographically amenable (depending on where you live) appearances as they are arranged.

Order Faith and Fear in Flushing: An Intense Personal History of the New York Mets from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or find it at a bookstore near you. Keep in touch and join the discussion on Facebook.