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.

I wake up most days with my mind on Met things that have already happened. Today I woke up with my mind on Met things that have not yet occurred. I woke up this morning and decided I wanted K-Rod as our closer.

Then I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and decided differently.

The only American League team to whom I pay the least bit of going attention (in a positive sense) is the Angels. I've followed Francisco Rodriguez since he blew away everybody he faced in the 2002 postseason, which is when I latched onto the Angels as, more or less, my A.L. team. I enjoyed watching him take the closer reins and was quite gratified when he blotted the name Bobby Thigpen from history's upper echelons. He is dynamic, he is exciting, he is brilliant.

He also scares the living spit out of me. He is Billy Wagner with younger, better stuff, but he's Billy Wagner not in that oh no, here comes Wagner, we the opposition are screwed way we looked at Wagner when he was an Astro, but rather in the sense we've gotten to know Billy Wagner first-hand. Rodriguez is Wagner in that what now? mode you attach to your own closer from watching him too closely and too often. I love K-Rod, but in an extracurricular, other-league manner. He comes here, and the ninth-inning butterflies are swirling while still caterpillars — assuming the caterpillars aren't routinely squashed in the cocoons of the sixth, seventh and eighth innings per usual.

K-Rod closing for the Mets? It could be great. It could be much worse. After these last two seasons of bullpen roulette, I'm not prepared for much worse. It can't get much worse. It can, but it can't. It just can't.

Thus, after deciding differently this morning, I leaned to Kerry Wood, someone I'd been writing off as injury-prone since his name first came up as closing possibility.

I've seen guys written off as injury-prone shake it off (as well as guys in that position who simply get more injured). Wood's only 2008 injury of disabling note was a blister, wasn't it? He didn't look too terribly blistered when saving two games against the Mets in the final week, did he? These are not rhetorical questions, by the way. Let me know if I'm crazy. I'm not suggesting a 20-year, $400 million Citi deal for Wood or the kind of terms K-Rod's going to command, even in a slow market. I'd sign Wood for no more than two years. I think the guy still throws very hard, will still have something very big to prove and will come here a lot cheaper than K-Rod or Brian Fuentes. Fuentes I want little part of given that he flopped as a closer once (in the only season when it really mattered for his team) and I wouldn't trust too many pitchers with Colorado in their background…even if supposedly the construct is “if he can pitch in Denver, he can pitch anywhere.” I understand he's lefthanded and lefties definitely need apply considering the presence of the lefty-laden world champs in our division, but the idea of Fuentes makes me squirm. He'll come here for too much money, he'll blow a couple of saves and then we're in “he can't handle New York” territory.

Underinformed speculation on my part? You bet. Talking out my asphalt? Could be. It's December, it snowed overnight, I woke up, for a Met change, wondering what's next. Catch me in a few hours and I could change my story completely.

Ow, this stove is … not particularly hot.

Ow, this stove is … not particularly hot.

During other, long-gone and apparently equally endless offseasons, Bill Veeck used to call up one of his fellow owners and engineer a “dog-and-cat trade” — a swap of generally useless utility infielders or outfield caddies or what in a few more generations would be called middle relievers. The idea wasn't really to improve the ballclub, though sometimes that was a lucky by-product, but to sell papers in two towns and keep fans talking about their baseball teams while the snow piled up.

Yes, dog-and-cat trades are pointless. But weeks like these remind you of why they're useful. Without them, you get the thigh-high morass of non-news, which for Met fans tends to mean anxiety and muttering.

It was just so Metsian, for instance, that a media tour of a ballpark that's finally starting to look like a ballpark would have to turn into an awkward colloquy on whether the Mets should give back $20 million as some kind of charitable gesture, and on Jeff Wilpon's feelings about credit crises and federal bailouts. Yeesh. Sometimes you look at the Mets and you think that Tommie Agee's twin catches and Zisk/Augustine and Mookie jack-knifing away from the plate and the ball squirting through Buckner are actually a vague return on our franchise's mostly unbroken run of buzzard's luck. Yay, we're getting $20 million a year for naming rights — and naming rights don't slump or get hurt! What could possibly go wrong?

Should Citibank dive into the death spiral it's trying to pull itself out of by cutting back on parts of its marketing budget designed to increase consumer awareness? Should the Mets forego the salary of a Cy Young winner or All-Star power hitter every year to show they too are tightening belts? Neither is worth even vaguely serious consideration — such a sacrifice would be a pinprick on Citi's balance sheet and a giant wound to the Mets' future payroll — but sports columnists and politicians make their livings outside the realm of vaguely serious consideration, running neck-and-neck as always in their race to be more fatuous. For me, the most interesting thing from the Citi tour was hearing that David Wright, Ryan Church and Nick Evans had taken batting practice there soon after the season ended — which cheered me up for about a nanosecond before it vanished under the tidal wave of polemical silliness.

A dog-and-cat trade would have pushed this nonsense off the sports pages, leaving us to wallow in more interesting nonsense. Instead, we have agate-wire pickups (Adam Bostick is back! We signed a backup catcher who doesn't have the initials R.C.!) that can't even excite me and Greg. We have closer anxiety before we actually have a closer, which was entirely sensible during our nightmare September but is pointless now. It's barely December and not one of them even plays for us, but I swear it feels like K-Rod has already blown a brace of saves for an enormous amount of money, Brian Fuentes isn't fooling anybody, and Huston Street is hurt. Oh, and Manny's potentially a Met target and Aaron Heilman wants to start but we don't want him to start because we'd be better off with him relieving, except recently he can't really relieve, so let's boo him. I swear I've read both those stories about 11,000 times since the Dow was at 11,000.

This always happens — were I a wiser man, I'd paw through this tangle of mini-stories and non-stories and maybe-stories and old stories, conclude “must be getting to be the second week of December,” and simply wait for the days to start getting longer instead of worrying about any of it. (And hey, remember that last offseason we did absolutely nothing anybody liked — until we stole the best starting pitcher on the planet away from the Twins.) But that's not the way baseball works in the dead of winter — this is the kind of “always happens” that's no help each time it happens again, because when the grass has turned to tundra and you've got your head scrunched down to your chest against the cold it's hard to imagine anything as simple and satisfying (or simple and aggravating) as a June game against the Pirates. So your baseball-starved mind fills up with the unsimple and the decidedly unsatisfying.

I flew back from North Carolina on the day after Thanksgiving, and coming into La Guardia I had an excellent view of Citi Field and Shea Stadium from just above the water, just as I'd hoped. Seen from the side, Citi looked startlingly finished and ready for action, and with its outer ring still intact so did Shea — two ballparks almost intertwined, nearly in each other's arms. At another time it might have given me a smile, or made me briefly sad, but not this time. Shea is no more but somehow still half-alive and Citi is near but not fully born, and knowing that made it into a mess — it looked like what it was, which was two ballparks occupying a space made for one.

The site, like the Mets and like all of us, is betwixt and between, stuck at the bleak crossroads of 2008's disappointments and 2009's anxieties. And it would be better for all involved if we could just hurry up, move along and get wherever it is we're going.