If you've explored the upper reaches of your digital cable or satellite packages, you may have come across the test airing of the MLB Network. It's debuting in earnest New Year's Day, which is excellent counterprogramming against all that inane college football. We know the only bowl game on which to be truly Bullish is the not-at-all embarrassingly named magicJack St. Petersburg Bowl, kicking off this Saturday at 4:30 P.M. on ESPN2. USF is an 11½-point favorite…to beat the traffic from Tampa, presumably. But never mind that right now.

All MLBN has shown to this point as it gives a transponders and whatnot a dry run is the 2004 World Series film (with a generous dose of 2004 ALCS, always delightful viewing); the 2005 World Series film (an underrated affair despite it being a sweep); one long montage of great moments; and a slew of promotional spots wherein the images of players past and present assault you at lightning speed.

There are a couple of Mets in Met uniforms, which is of course uplifting as hell in the third week of December. There are too many shots of Phillies, which is of course dismaying as hell any week in any month. But then there is the final player pictured, throwing a pitch and punctuating emphatically the highlights. He's not wearing a Mets uniform, but he is a Met. He's Francisco Rodriguez.

The guy who ends the spot is a relief pitcher, chosen to represent all relief pitchers…chosen to represent all closers…chosen to represent what it means to wind down a game successfully and definitively. And that relief pitcher, that closer, is a New York Met.

He's dressed as an Angel, but that's a mere technicality. We, the home office of bullpen apoplexy, now model excellence in the field. We have K-Rod. It is exciting to consider. We have J.J., for that matter. I find that exciting as I consider it. I am hoping for a couple more exciting arms in their department so my tentative (if not exactly contemporary) nickname for this presumably rehabilitated crew, Frankie & The Knockouts, can become operational, sweetheart.

The implication is they will be relievers who knock out the opposition, not relief pitchers who are knocked out by the opposition. We tried that formula a lot in the latter stages of 2008. It didn't work.

I've never been enthused in advance about a Mets bullpen. We've had some good ones gel, but those came together by happenstance and sampling. I wasn't sitting and ruminating ten years ago about how I couldn't wait for Dennis Cook and Turk Wendell to hand the ball to Armando Benitez so he could set it up for John Franco even if that turned out to be a darn good pen. Maybe it's because the Mets have, to date, done nothing to improve anything else about their flawed team that I'm anxious to get to the ends of the games and see these stress-tested late-inning guys do their highly compensated thing.

In Mets garb, naturally.

Of course it was Greg who sent me the link, from the awesomer-than-awesome Crane Pool forum: A Met fan's first-ever game, preserved in New York Times prose and baseball cards, a card for each of the men who'd played in it, the whole shebang beautifully framed by this Mets fan. How cool is that?

So cool that my immediate thought, as a father trying to raise his son as a member in good standing of the Church of Baseball, Orange and Blue denomination, was that Joshua needed one of these posthaste, to commemorate his own initiation into the finest art form to ever spring from the mind of man. (And I'm not kidding. I'm sure the Sistine Chapel's great and all, but has it ever moved you to hug total strangers while screaming with joy? In the dead of winter, are you comforted by old DVDs about the Taj Mahal? Didn't think so.)

There was just one small problem with my new plan, as I noted to Emily in my exploratory email: “Joshua's first game was a hideous loss and involved Kris Benson.” Which is what I remembered of it off-hand.

My wife is not the type for a leisurely fly-by when there's a target on the ground that needs obliterating. “How much therapy are you trying to sink your child for?” she shot back. “And do we need to have a card for the wife?” (That threw me for a minute. Then I realized she meant Anna. Remember Anna?)

Just how hideous a loss had August 29, 2004 been, anyway? I tried to remember more dispassionately. Surely there must have been something transformative, some lyrical something or other to stir the soul in all the ways Greg and I like to celebrate here. So I started clicking.

And yes, there was something: Let the record show that in Joshua's first game Robin Ventura, forever beloved in these parts for his dry wit and his Grand Slam Single, hit his 17th career grand slam, putting him ahead of two players named Aaron and Ruth and alongside two players named Williams and Foxx. Ventura, being Ventura, said simply that “it’s nice to even be mentioned in any category whatsoever with those guys.” (He would hit one more — a pinch-hit job, no less — as a capper for a dignified, admirable career.)

So OK, that is nice. There's just one problem: Ventura was a Los Angeles Dodger at the time.

Dodgers 10, Mets 2. It was hot as hell, the Mets made two errors in the fourth to hand the Dodgers three runs, and Benson gave up eight in four innings to fall to 2-3 since he'd arrived from Pittsburgh on the same infamous night that saw Scott Kazmir turn into Victor Zambrano.

Bad enough.

But now go back and look at that box score again.

The Mets' starting lineup was Gerald Williams, Jeff Keppinger, Cliff Floyd, Richard Hidalgo, David Wright, Brian Buchanan, Jason Phillips, Wilson Delgado and Kris Benson, an assemblage so bad that after seeing it on the scoreboard, you would have been forgiven for expecting to see Lorinda de Roulet and Mettle the Mule. The pitchers were Benson, Pedro Feliciano and a rapidly putrefying John Franco. Met cameos were made by Danny Garcia, Eric Valent, Vance Wilson and a nearing-the-end Todd Zeile.

My God.

I subjected an innocent child to 10 at-bats from Gerald Williams, Brian Buchanan and Wilson Delgado, which is 10 more than any sane baseball team would have given them in 2004. Yes, I know — David Wright. Agreed, he's the accidental dab of ointment in this jar of flies. He was also double-switched out in the fifth after going 0 for 2.

Oh, on the Dodgers' side? The winning pitcher was Kaz Ishii, who scattered four hits over six innings and somehow scored a run. And Shawn Green scored two. Perhaps those performances convinced members of the Shea brass that one day those two fine players would put the Mets over the top.

And the home-plate umpire? It was Angel Hernandez.

So while I love the idea of the framed first game in theory, given how it turned out for Joshua, I'm passing. If I want my son to grow up as a Met fan, it's in my interest not to have him stare up at a 10-2 box score, examine baseball cards of Wilson Delgado, Kris Benson and Kaz Ishii, or even know about the existence of Gerald Williams. The other day, during the final minutes of a fairly stirring NFL game with playoff implications, I sighed deeply and told whomever was listening (which was probably nobody) that I'd trade watching this fourth-quarter comeback for a single inning of a meaningless Brewers-Rockies game. And I meant it. But the Met defeat on Aug. 29, 2004? I wouldn't watch that in January with three feet of snow outside. I wouldn't watch that after five baseball-less years in prison.

Emily's much more sensible suggestion was, of course, to frame a record of Joshua's first win. Which was this game. Angel Hernandez called the balls and strikes again, but that was just about the only thing not to like: The Mets rallied for three in the eighth, Billy Wagner collected his 300th career save, and the starting lineup included not only Wright (and the blameless Cliff Floyd) but also Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran and a very different player named Delgado. Now that's worth having on your wall.

OK, so the starting pitcher was T@m G!avine. You can't have everything.

A more direct look at Chris D'Orso's handiwork right here.

Thirty years ago this very night, I made my debut on the big stage, or the biggest stage upon which I was ever going to act. I was in my first high school play, “Heaven Can Wait,” playing the key role of Inspector Williams…a key role if you consider eighth lead crucial to telling a story. My scholastic theatrical career came and went without much notice, though the kind mother of a good friend always complimented my performances with, “You have real stage presence.” I took that to mean I was one of the bigger kids in the play.

Maybe it's just those annual mid-December backstage nerves I developed in 1978, but I've been thinking about the subject of stage presence for a couple of weeks. The Friday before last, Stephanie and I were handed great tickets to the current revival of “A Man For All Seasons,” starring Frank Langella and other people. That's what it felt like, not unlike Game 161 this year when it was Johan Santana and a cast of dozens putting on a show in Flushing. Langella — now that guy has stage presence. The theater isn't for everybody, but when you're lucky enough to witness someone dominate a stage (as we were when we saw Johan on September 27), you feel that just by sitting in the audience you're part of a grand tradition. You understand why theater can still thrive despite everything that's been invented to make the act of going to see a play seem antiquated.

Langella's not the only man for all seasons who's crossed my radar of late. His Sir Thomas More is the kind of character you root for. Sir Greg Maddux, on the other hand, was somebody we had cause to root against. He was a Brave and a Cub mostly. Why would he root for him considering the troupes with which he toured? Yet he was a master of his stage and, whatever you think of his late-career innings rationing, not an unlikable sort as opponents go. Let's just say where your recent 300-game winners are concerned, he's the class of the field.

Maddux announced his retirement last week, which is noteworthy unto itself, I suppose, but that's not why he's been on my radar. At his muted goodbye press conference at the winter meetings, SNY's Matt Yallof bothered to ask him about the Mets-Braves rivalry of yore. I expected a little lip service, if that. What I heard confirmed for me why Greg Maddux always struck me as a little classier and a lot smarter than almost all of his peers.

“It was fun. It was always fun going to New York. We had Chipper on our team, and Chipper always used to do big things there. It was fun watching the guys play there and it was also fun being a part of it.

“Shea Stadium was one of the best places to play baseball on the road, and especially when the Mets were good, and there was just a buzz in the air there that you'll never forget. There was a smell there at Shea that you'll never forget. There were just certain things about Shea Stadium, that 'this is a pretty cool place to be' and you're just lucky to be a part of it. Sittin' down there in the bullpen with…the security guard down there, talkin', tellin' war stories until the game starts. You have a lot of memories of every ballpark and it seems like you spend a lot of time in the bullpen at Shea Stadium.”

The practiced cynic can infer Maddux, like Chipper, remembers Shea fondly because the Braves did pretty well for themselves here. But color me impressed by Greg's response to a pretty random query. Maddux got it. Maddux understood what pitching in front of the likes of us was about (as opposed to being lulled to sleep in Atlanta). He could have genericed his reply. But it was thoughtful and, for my biased money, he was on target. He got it. He got that Shea was a big stage — a great stage, a great audience appreciative of the craft of baseball. You can't construct that quality no matter how pretty your building, and you can't fake that kind of perspective without having a lot on the ball.

I doubt 300-game winner Roger Clemens would ever say such things about Shea. I doubt 300-game winner and former Brave/Met (in that order) T#m Gl@v!ne would ever say such things about Shea. Come to think of it, the latter pitched here for five years and never remotely acknowledged that this was a pretty cool place to be.

Too bad, I find myself thinking, Francisco Rodriguez won't ever pitch for the Mets in Shea Stadium. A different mound persona than Greg Maddux, to be sure, but his conference call chat showed me he, too, gets what it's going to be like pitching for the Mets in the Mets' home ballpark. Never mind the “team to beat” nonsense that's a no-win subject. What I liked was this:

“The Mets fans, when I was out there three years ago, they made a lot of noise. I tried to draw energy from the crowd. With the energy and all the noise they make, it's going to be a lot more exciting for me on the mound.”

Of course K-Rod is on the M-Ets because of compensation first and foremost. But I like that he grasps what we're all about. I love that he remembers his experience at Shea (believe me, I remember it, too). I like that he's showing, at least in December, no fear. No fear of National League batters, no fear of his home team fans. He did pretty well for himself in Anaheim, but he characterized Angels fans as “more calm. They're really relaxed when they're watching the game.” He didn't seem to be issuing that appraisal as a compliment.

Mets relievers have heard it from Mets fans en masse for years. But it's encouraging to hear from a Mets closer that he likes what we bring to the stage. Nothing about how modern and spacious his new clubhouse is, mind you. Just the stage he envisions and the patrons of his art who will, one hopes, form with him a mutual appreciation guild.

Reminds me of a quote I just read from a book I have to tell you more about when I get a chance. One of Rodriguez's predecessors, Tug McGraw, on pitching before Mets fans the first time he did so as a Phillie:

“What an emotional thing it is to come back here and do a good job. Shea has a magnitude, an intangible air that other stadiums don't have.”

The greats recognize the great stage when they are fortunate to perform upon it and they embrace its challenges. It's what makes them the greats.

Like any rightly prioritized Mets fan, I spent Wednesday evening watching the UltiMet Classic airing on SNY, the three-hit shutout spun by Johan Santana on Saturday, September 27. It was the final Mets win in the history of old Shea Stadium and, maybe, the end of an era in another way.

When Johan induced a deep fly to left from Cody Ross for the final out, “Takin' Care of Business” blasted from the loudspeakers. It became a tradition in 2006 and it stayed a tradition, outlasting some mighty seedy business in 2007 and 2008. It was a tacit acknowledgement that the Mets envisioned themselves essentially the same team from the year they dominated the Eastern Division to the moment they were desperately trying to stave off their second consecutive premature elimination.

Within a couple of hours of the rebroadcast, the music stopped playing for the Mets of that era. I think we've moved on, and I'm not talking just from Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

The Mets have dramatically altered their cast of characters, trading a trio of featured performers from the TCB era in a moderately epic transaction that clearly looks ahead. It's hello, J.J. Putz, legitimate closer turned Francisco Rodriguez opening act. It's hello, two other guys I've heard of from the Mariners, Sean Green (whose name will inevitably be misspelled) and Jeremy Reed. It's a three-team, twelve-player deal that also waves some serious goodbyes.

Goodbye Joe Smith. Goodbye Aaron Heilman. Goodbye Endy Chavez.

Goodbye to 2008 and 2007 and 2006.

The bottom line portion feels strongly net-positive because our last conscious thoughts, to channel Douglas MacArthur, have been of the pen, the pen and the pen. This pen needed a Putz as opposed to what it's been filled with lately (go ahead, get it out of your system). Yet it's strange. Learning the guys who are no longer Mets were no longer Mets took me by surprise.

I'd gotten used to Joe Smith, even if it's only been two seasons. Smith was a nice story, the youth and the sidearming, the vague gee-whizness about him yet the guts to punch out one big-time righty after another. He was the only reliever I trusted by the end of 2008, which is a sad commentary on the state of Met relievers considering Smitty was a specialist, but he earned that trust. He takes it to Cleveland, the other corner of this triangular trade.

I'd gotten used to Aaron Heilman, even as I kept thinking I should get to a doctor and see about having him removed. There was a lost opportunity, maybe two, with Heilman. That endless hum of chatter that perhaps he should be a starter was not without merit. He worked hard to become a good one — anybody remember that one-hitter? — and he was moved for the good of the team. Nobody with tenure ever does anything for the good of the team, save for the occasional exceptional Craig Biggio type. Heilman moved for the good of the team to the pen, whether he wanted to or not. He was nasty for a while. Then he was hurting and immensely ineffective. I saw Aaron more as pitiable than pitiful. I saw him as a Met since 2003. I saw him give up a monster of a home run to Barry Bonds and survive to beat the Giants anyway. I saw him keep the Cardinals at bay, tightrope style, in the twelfth and the thirteenth and the fourteenth until Albert Pujols got the last word in on him. The last word for Aaron Heilman and the Mets should be somewhere north of “boo.” I hope his next words are “…and starting for the Seattle Mariners.”

I'd gotten used to Endy Chavez and his continuous loop. You'd think Endy had done only one thing in a Mets uniform. He never had to do anything else, but he kept contributing as best he could and as frequently as asked, which was mostly in tops of ninths when the Mets led and somebody inexperienced or brittle needed to be removed from left. That final-ever Shea Stadium win that ended with a deep fly? That fly landed in Endy's glove, inserted minutes earlier. No big shock. We all know Endy Chavez's glove is where homers went to die. Now Endy Chavez's glove and all the rest of him go to Seattle. He'll catch everything there, too. Other outfielders can only envy Chavez.

Smith, Heilman and Chavez (plus Jason Vargas, Mike Carp and two minor leaguers utterly unfamiliar to me) are all gone. They may not have been the signature players of the past three seasons, but they left their mark on this era that feels, every day, like another era. Not saying that's a bad thing. Watching that final win of 2008 Wednesday night twisted me up good inside. Part of that was the drama of the game itself, part of it was knowing what followed the next afternoon. We know the Mets lost that Sunday and didn't make the playoffs just like they lost on the same Sunday in 2007 and didn't make those playoffs. But that's not what was twisting my insides.

When the Mets didn't win Game 162 again, it ended Shea, yes, and ended the season, sure, but it also ended these past three years, the three years of “Takin' Care Of Business” every day. This is not a musical rumination. Mets games were a lot of fun to be at since 2006. Yeah, morons sat behind me and yeah, idiots booed, and you bet, three graspable World Series refused to be played before my eyes, but it was an exciting time, I swear it was. Even with the attendance figures inflated beyond rational belief, Shea was a lot more filled than not. The fans were a lot more happy than not. We were always in it. There was always something at stake. It curdled in mid- to late September twice, it came up a scooch short in October once, but it was a great thing to be a part of. Before 2006, it was only intermittently like that.

Every era of Mets baseball is my era, I like to say. It's why I was so touched when those 43 Mets walked onto the field after Shea's final out. Except for the few guys whose Met careers completely predated my awareness, every one of them set off an electrical charge for me. In an instant I was back in their seasons, watching their teams. Those were my seasons, my teams. Smith and Heilman and Chavez…those guys, too. They're 2008 and 2007 and 2006, the whole vibe that the Mets were so close to the promised land. Even if it revealed itself as a misguided notion, it brought me to a state of constant roar. It might surprise you to learn that's not my default setting. And it surely gave me a lot to write about in this space.

Let's not get too carried away with our bon voyages. Smith and Heilman and Chavez are gone, but Wright and Reyes and Beltran and Delgado are still here, as are a few others who have filled supporting roles in our most recent seasons of boisterous contention. The goal is to have that core, in conjunction with St. Johan and our merry band of closers, touch off a whole other era — ideally an even better era in what's intended to be the most worthy of settings.

That would be fantastic. But it won't be what we've had. What we've had needed revision very badly in spots, niches that have been, as far as can be told from the vantage of December, beautifully addressed. Yet I wouldn't lightly dismiss what we've had. We've had a pretty high time for three years. Three Mets who had a hand in it are no longer Mets. It is no longer their team, their time. That is not necessarily to be mourned, but it is to be acknowledged. So, too, it is emphasized, in case we forgot, that our favorite game is a business. Sometimes, no matter what's come before, business has got to be taken care of.

And speaking of business, Metstradamus made quick work of any and all sentimentality one is tempted to attach to the career of Aaron Heilman with a stunning video tribute here.

So with K-Rod barely over his tour of Citi Field, he gets a sidekick: J.J. Putz, whose name is pronounced “puts.” As in “puts down Phillie farragos, Brave brouhahas, Marlin mischief and Nat nastiness in the eighth.”

Unless he screws up, in which case it'll be pronounced the way I assumed it was pronounced until I first saw him on national TV.

The downside? It's that Shawn Green is back. Ha ha, no, it's SEAN Green we get, a sinkerballing righty who was a bridge to Putz last year for a while before both he and Putz seemed to lose their way. (In other words, they both got demoted a rank.) Green II is a middle reliever; so we'll throw him against the wall of the season with the rest of the bullpen spaghetti and hope he sticks. Oh, and from the Indians we got Jeremy Reed, a so-far-failed outfield prospect.

Gone are Aaron Heilman, Endy Chavez and Joe Smith, along with brief Met Jason Vargas, positionless now-not-a-future-Met Mike Carp and two minor-leaguers, Maikel Cleto and Ezequiel Carrera.

A change of scenery and simple regression to the mean will probably mean a much better year for Heilman, and may the baseball gods bless him for it. While the stats said he'd be better just by pitching his way out of statistical noise, everything you know about New York and New York fans suggested that too many bad things had happened for him to ever get a chance to pitch without spectator noise. Heilman is far, far better off — for his own sake as much as ours — as somebody else's problem or, quite possibly, somebody else's nice comeback story.

Endy? If I ever cross paths with him in a bar I'll of course buy him a beer and ask how he ever jumped that high, but as a hitter he was a heck of a defensive outfielder.

Joe Smith, like Sean Green, is a middle reliever.

K-Rod's strikeouts have declined and Putz stumbled through injuries last year, true. But come Opening Day K-Rod will be 27 and Putz will be 31. In the last two years they've accounted for 152 saves. The bullpen killed us in '08; now, it would take a remarkably pessimistic Met fan to deny it's been resurrected.

K-Rod and Putz won't serve as our missing starting pitchers, man the two corner outfield spots and kidnap Luis Castillo. But it's a heck of a start, ain't it? We should remember that even with this upgrade, our bullpen will cause us sleepless nights. That's what bullpens do. But for tonight, at least, we can sleep more soundly.