I love the Mets because I love the Mets.

I don't love the Mets because they are such a well-run organization filled with the kind of people whose baseball acumen translates to a satisfying sense of your fate being in good hands. Only the Pirates and their sixteen consecutive losing seasons sit between the Mets and rock bottom in terms of reasonable return on resources.

I don't love the Mets because they treat their customers with care and respect. I've been to the past fourteen home games and I know they approach us with unsurpassed indifference as they hold us in utter contempt. Friday night they looked at us and saw, at best, 49,545 walking cash machines or, at worst, the reason they couldn't go home early.

I don't love the Mets because of the great mass of Mets fans. Too many Mets fans come to Mets games for reasons that apparently have nothing to do with supporting the Mets. These are the kinds of people who stand in your way in supermarket aisles and cut you off on the Southern State and boo their cats for not being dogs.

I don't love the Mets because of the players who are currently on the Mets. The players on the Mets, individually and as a unit, haven't forged an instinctual connection with me. I have nothing against them but I find myself with little in particular for them. Some are talented and seem good-natured and I appreciate their efforts on my nominal behalf. Mostly, though, I don't feel this bunch all that much. And, though it's not a jailing crime, they're just not very good.

I don't love the Mets because they are replacing Shea Stadium with World Class Citi Field. I don't like that at all, actually. I don't like that by selling off every last piece of Shea they are demonstrating their intent to blot out as much Mets history as possible so one man can indulge a personal nostalgia for a team very few of us ever saw. Mets ownership wants us to believe the last 47 years have been no more than an asterisk between Brooklyn Dodger dynasties real and imagined.

I love the Mets because I love the Mets.

That's what it comes down to on the morning of the second-to-last game of this season, the second-to-last game ever at Shea Stadium, the cloudy preamble to a murky finale. My overexposure to the Mets in September 2008 has left me with only my love as a reason for my love. It is circular reasoning whose perimeter permits no logic to permeate. I love the Mets because I love the Mets even though there is almost nothing on the surface about the Mets that I can stand anymore.

But I do love the Mets. Which is why, in my heart, I am rooting for the end today.

I don't know how to accomplish it in a dignified fashion. It was going to be easier when the scheduled starting pitcher was Undecided. I have no attachment to a rainy-day parade of middle relievers and overmatched youngsters. Let them go out and suck it up, let it be some Gl@v!nesque score before too long, let it be over with and then let whoever our enemy in the standings is this weekend go out and put us out of our misery. Then let me come back to Shea Stadium on Sunday free and clear of competitive implications — nobody riled up — and let me enjoy one final game in something resembling the sun. Give me my moments of contemplation and emotion and give me my procession of players I did feel and let me enjoy my time with those folks like me who came to love the Mets because they, like me, love the Mets.

Then Jerry Manuel announced Johan Santana would start on short rest today. And I can't root against that. I couldn't root against Jonathon Niese or Brandon Knight either, of course, but I could kind of ease out the door and not hold myself responsible. Niese? Knight? We're not serious about winning anyway. But Johan on three days' rest, whether or not it works, is an indication that somebody with a hand on the wheel actually cares about how they finish. Al Leiter went on three days' rest in Game Six in Atlanta and was predictably clobbered. Johan Santana is about three times the pitcher Leiter ever was (that's not a knock on Al, it's just a fact), but pitchers don't go on three days' rest and haven't for more than thirty years.

Johan Santana has done everything you could want from him and the Mets are sitting on the edge of extinction on the penultimate day of the season with 88 wins. That's one more win than they had 52 weeks ago this morning when they were sitting on the edge of extinction. That's the Mets for you: bring in the best pitcher in baseball and improve exactly one iota. Johan proved his worth and his grit the other night against the Cubs. If he can't produce his high-end magic on command, I won't hold it against him.

I don't hold anything against these guys. They're not that good is all. There are like five players who are and everybody else is a stopgap. How can anybody get mad at the Mets for being no better than they really are? The one movie for which I drop everything whenever it's on is Rudy. Rudy's dream is to make the football team at Notre Dame and nothing — certainly not his lack of football skill — is going to stop him. His spiteful older brother Frank, however, is not impressed by his quest or his progress.

“If you are on that team,” Frank tells Rudy, “my opinion of Notre Dame just hit the shits.”

That's how I see the National League in 2008. The Mets are in a position to potentially make the playoffs? These Mets? The Mets of Brian Stokes and Luis Ayala and Bobby Parnell and Ramon Martinez and Robinson Cancel and wave upon wave of underdeveloped kid and overtraveled retread? The same Mets who committed a small GDP to Johan Santana yet have gotten by otherwise on Dollar Tree bargains and almost made it? That is worthy of admiration if you squint, but not worthy of being taken seriously.

How do people boo these guys? How do you get mad at a team that isn't that good for performing to reputation? How do you get down on Aaron Heilman for being Aaron Heilman, Pedro Feliciano for being Pedro Feliciano, everybody for being everybody? I used to lament that nobody stuck around much on this roster, that you never got to know Mets before they became something else. Now we've got a few guys who have been Mets a pretty long time, like Heilman, like Feliciano, and they are treated not as old hands trying their best but as vermin for whom you'd better call Arrow Exterminating. I won't pretend either Heilman or Feliciano has his picture tacked above my figurative headboard; they're not my favorites or anything. But geez! Heilman pitching with whatever injuries he's been harboring can't quite get the last out of an inning and you can't say “thanks anyway”?

It was reported in the darkest days of the mostly dark days of the New Jersey Nets franchise that they pumped crowd noise into the Meadowlands to make it sound fuller and more encouraging. I swear we have the opposite at Shea now. Somebody presses a button and I hear boos. It's automatic, a misanthropic mangling of the electronic cheerleading: EVERYBODY CLEAR YOUR THROAT! (BooBooBooBoo Boo Boo Boo!)

I sat in front of somebody booing on Friday night. Booed Parnell. Booed Feliciano. Booed Heilman. It wasn't drunken booing and it wasn't exhibitionistic booing. It was simple disappointment-driven booing, the frustration of watching a so-called playoff contender crumble before the mighty Florida Marlins. His girlfriend tried to talk him down, but he was just mad and sullen. He didn't know how else to respond. He just thought this is what you do when things don't go your way.

I still don't get it. It wasn't my biggest priority last night to analyze him and his 10,000 like-minded cohorts, but I don't get it. The Mets won't play any better because you boo. Shea won't feel any less tense because you boo. Your memory of the third-to-last game ever in this building won't be enhanced because you booed. All you'll have is a sore throat.

One of the Kozy Shack-sponsored video vignettes shown in the half-hearted DiamondVision salute to Shea history focused on the '73 Mets, a squad described as “injury-plagued and underachieving”. When, I asked my very good friend Jim Haines on the occasion of our final Shea Stadium game together, have the Mets not been injury-plagued and underachieving? Injury-plagued and underachieving could characterize the '74 Mets and the '75 Mets and the '76 Mets…right up to the '08 Mets. They are injured. They haven't achieved what's been in reach, their Quadruple-A underpinnings notwithstanding. But this is what they do and who they are. That is why we so often hold in highest esteem the rare edition of this club that exceeds expectations. I dwell fondly on the summer of 1980 and the heart of the 1997 season even if they lacked the happy ending of 1969 because it was so unlike the Mets to overcome expectations. Usually they simply don't live up to them. If this was news to you as of September 26, 2008, you haven't been paying attention and maybe you shouldn't have bought a ticket.

I hate the booing, but I can live with it most weekends. Not this one. I didn't buy my way in to every game this weekend and make sure I was at every home game this month to hear you boo, to have you cast more of a pall than even a lousy bullpen could on my final hours in the only ballpark I will ever truly consider mine. It's bad enough that the Mets can't win enough games to extend this season into a postseason. It's bad enough that the Mets train their employees at the Rikers Island Customer Service Academy. It's bad enough that a request for “only or mostly onions if you can please” on my final ever Premio Italian Sausage was met with bafflement and a heap of peppers. It's bad enough that for every promotion, the first 25,000 get the item and the next 25,000 get the finger, unless it's Foam Finger Day. It's bad enough the scoreboard posted three separate announcements urging you to call a Vandalism Hotline and rat out anybody you see trying to make off with the napkin dispensers before they can be auctioned for insane profit. It's bad enough that the pennant the Mets gave away at the door would receive a C+ in most arts & crafts classes (which is strange considering the Mets are generally expert at giving away pennants). It's bad enough that the whole Greatest Moments presentation, like the whole Countdown debacle, was underwhelming and apathetically handled. Everything with the Mets gives you no reliable rationale to love them but you do anyway.

What I am left with is the ideal of the Mets, loving the Mets for the sake of loving the Mets. Loving the Mets because I always have and Shea Stadium has always been my destination and all I've ever wanted to do was go there and sit there and be with my friends — like Laurie Thursday night, like Jim last night, like Jason this afternoon weather permitting — who love the Mets for the same nonlinear reasons I do. Poor Jim. Jim blames himself for the Mets losing whenever he goes. They lose almost always when he goes. The Mets are 2-11 in our last thirteen games together. Every afternoon before every night game I've attended with Jim I am filled with anticipation for how much I am going to love sitting with him and deconstructing the Mets and life. Since August 18, 2005, the Mets are 0-10 in night games we've attended together. I had nine instances of precedent to prepare me for the loss last night and I looked forward to our going just as much as I had those other nine times. He implicitly blamed himself for Friday's loss — himself and Daniel Murphy for not being taller and more agile. Yet I've never regretted a moment we've been together in those seats.

For all the kvetching and moaning I've done since taking the September plunge, I haven't regretted any of it because I've gotten to sit next to people for whom my affection is almost boundless. They more than Santana and Wright and Reyes and the reliever of the minute club and the idiots who block off escalators and can't prepare a pretzel…they have come to represent the Mets for me. They represent Shea Stadium to me. The walkoff hits in the rain are sublime, but the nine innings that precede them are made whole by those on my left or right. They've given me a month I will hold dear from now to doomsday. For them and people like them — the people who endure 6-1 defeats that send a season to the brink and then step outside and take pictures because they'll never see Shea again — I wish the Mets would win today and win tomorrow and for the Brewers to lose to the Cubs twice and for us to go on. Surely I'd like a shot at a championship. Surely our collective psyche would be boosted should the Mets live up to that sign I saw held in the Field Boxes Thursday after Beltran scored Reyes:

NY PLAYOFF BASEBALL — ONLY IN QUEENS!

Not so deep down, though, I kind of wish the Mets and all their nonsense would just go away. It's a baseball season curdling at the edges now. It's the end of September. I don't want winter to start the night of September 28, but maybe it must. Maybe this season should stop screwing with us already. At bare minimum this season's fortunes must be straightened out by Sunday afternoon. It must not be left to the wolves baying at its failures at that moment the Mets of my youth and the Mets of my relatively recent maturity come marching out of whatever tunnel they will be kept. I've been waiting since April for this Shea Goodbye ritual. I don't need to buy two seats for $869. I don't need to join the Premiere Club for $25,000. I don't need to run to the New Era stand so I can purchase my Official Final Weekend cap for whatever they're charging (bloodsuckers). I need the postgame ceremony, however. I need it and want it. I want the Mets to admit they do have a history of which they are proud. I want to breathe in 1964 and 1969 and everything thereafter. I want to see, one more time, the Mets who gave me and my friends something to talk about. I want the Mets being the Mets before they are remarketed as latter-day Dodgers in faux Ebbets Field.

I've been on hand for, I suppose, tens of thousands of Mets fans' final visits to Shea this season. I've watched the pictures get taken and I've heard the buzz. “This is my last game at Shea…wow. I can't believe I won't be here again. Bye Shea!” Those people had their day. Now I want mine. I want it free and clear. I don't want the shortsighted sniping that the Mets fucking did it to us again in the last game, how could they do this to me? — BOOOOOO!!!!!! to ruin it. I don't want a torrent of grumbling from the types who don't pay attention to anything that isn't instant gratification to drown out the footsteps of 45 years. I want those people to leave in the seventh inning. If Shea Stadium has no more than me and my wife and the souls who share our values, even if there aren't 56,000 of us by then, fine. We will make the right kind of noise for Mr. Seaver and Mr. Piazza and Mr. Strawberry and whoever else shows up. We will make it a salute to ourselves and our love for love's sake and those with whom we've shared it. I don't need the slim prospect of a Wild Card play-in game for that.

When I was sick a couple of weeks ago and I dragged myself to Shea on the Friday night when it rained and for the Saturday doubleheader and the Sunday afternoon game, do you know what my biggest anxiety was? It wasn't that I would make myself sicker. It was that I wouldn't be able to cheer properly. It was that when it came time to yell LET'S GO METS! that I couldn't because my throat hurt too much and I was coughing a lot. I went anyway and I yelled anyway. I got rained out, lost two out of three and was sold no pretzel for my troubles, but I yelled. I cheered. I went. I regretted only what was unavoidably regrettable. The rest I was all in for and that's fine. That's what I do.

For my own sake, for the team I love, for the team I've loved forever, for the team that ran us through the gamut two Octobers ago and again last September with heartbreak our only reward in both instances and for the place I will eternally inhabit even as its appointment with demolition draws nigh, I really wouldn't mind if the Mets would get it over with and lose today. I really wouldn't mind if then the Cubs — the first team I ever rooted against and is now supposed to be my temporary savior — lost. If all unlikely prospects of continuation of 2008 were to be definitively statistically eliminated, I could come to Shea Stadium Sunday and have one last beautiful, angst-free day. I would have no shot at a championship, but I'd have peace of mind where the Mets are concerned.

That's way too much to ask for. Let's Go Mets.

The rain stayed away. It might have been better if it had come.

If it were May or June, this would be one of those drab, no-show games that you immediately toss down the memory hole. Being late September, it was like having cinder block after cinder block piled on top of you. Chris Volstad keeps going 2-1 and 3-1 and the Mets keep letting him escape. Oof! Third time through the lineup and now Volstad can get that curveball over. Ugh! Mike Pelfrey arguably had Josh Willingham struck out, Bruce Dreckman didn't call it and now Willingham has banged one off the orange plywood-and-chicken-wire foul-pole extension that amused me when I was reading Paul Lukas's take on it but now makes me want to cry. Ouch! Oh goodie, the bullpen is here for its usual slow-motion car wreck. Pedro Feliciano is hitting guys and Aaron Heilman is walking them. Gasp! And now Hanley Ramirez is on the warpath again. Jesus, Hanley, I've always thought you were a great player, so cut it out. Auggh! And now we have too far to go. [Death rattle]

So, one game behind Milwaukee with two to go. Johan Santana will pitch one of them, but which one? It's like some psychotic variation of the Lady or the Tiger: If you get the Lady you have to immediately pick from another set of doors, only this time there are many more of them, lots of Tigers and possibly no Lady behind any of them. But if you get the Tiger the first time, the Lady's appearance doesn't matter. Hell, that doesn't make any sense, but what does in a world where we don't convert a runner on third and nobody out one night, then get a miracle from Ramon Martinez and Robinson Cancel the next? If Jon Niese or Brandon Knight starts tomorrow and loses, the season is quite possibly over and everyone will wail and gnash forevermore about how we needed to pitch Santana. If Santana pitches and wins tomorrow, the season comes down to Niese or Knight, with Johan watching helplessly from behind the dugout railing. If Santana goes tomorrow and loses on three days' rest, a lot of stupid people will say a lot of stupid things about him. And no matter what, we need help from a Cub team that has its feet up.

I know, I know, Santana has to go tomorrow. But there's a military acronym for this situation — AOS. It stands for All Options Suck. And it's decisions like this that make me glad that while I'm an insane fan, I'm not a manager.

The worst thing of all? It's that I can feel myself sliding beyond this next logical stage of grief and working my way toward acceptance. No bullpen, half of a starting rotation, no natural left fielder, a concussed right fielder, no second baseman, a carousel of beat-up and suspect catchers — there's no possible shame in falling short with that, and no collapse involved. It's a goddamn miracle the team got this far, seeing where they were in mid-June. I know nothing is decided, and I'll be out there cheering my guts out for a team that's spent the year surprising me in ways both good and bad, and praying that somehow old Shea gets a stay of execution. But the hangman is here, and defiance feels very hard to muster.

My back to the wall, a victim of laughing chance

This is for me the essence of true romance

Sharing the things we know and love with those of my kind

Libations, sensations that stagger the mind

—Steely Dan

I've crossed that fine line from theoretical home stretch to the beginning of the end of the line. This is no longer a drill. This is no longer me thinking about what it will be like at the end of Shea Stadium. This one's for real, I already bought the dream. I can stop having little fits of emotion late at night and during the day and on the train listening to the wrong song on my iPod. I can quit wondering whether I am going to miss Shea as much as I say I will or if I'm just saying that because I think I should miss Shea that much.

It's too late for all that. It's hitting me hourly. And in the middle of it all, these Mets and their games. They're still playing. They're still alive. Oh, they're alive all right.

And there I am in the middle of it like I've never been before, an ornament, I'd like to think, to the pennant race, certainly a face in the crowd…every crowd, every night.

Even in the wind. Even in the rain. Even after Wednesday. Even down 6-3 in the seventh one pitch after Pedro Martinez has theatrically saluted us for saluting him, one uncomfortable beat after Ricardo Rincon has been nailed to a cross constructed of forMicah.

When Thursday night's game ended in absolute, overwhelming Met triumph. Laurie and I feverishly exchanged high-fives with the two guys directly behind us. Big deal, you're thinking, everybody does that when their team wins. Yes, but two innings earlier, I suspected there was going to be genuine violence between at least two of us four: Laurie and the guy who placed a little too much ignorant emphasis on Ricardo Rincon's Mexican heritage as he expressed frustration over Micah Hoffpauir's seemingly spine-crushing three-run homer. A little tense back-and-forth ensued, the guy saying he's entitled to express his opinion over his team any way he wants (while addressing Laurie as “ma'am”) and Laurie respectfully suggesting if he really hates his team as his steady and loud running diatribe implied, he ought to be doing something else. Despite the guy's friend insisting “we're all in this together,” it was truly bordering on the unpleasant when I threw in my two cents that let's calm down, this stadium's only got four more days, relax and enjoy it.

“Hey,” one of them said. “It's got more than four days!”

“That's the spirit,” I said, rather half-heartedly and a little sarcastically. It was 6-3, Pedro Martinez's Mets career was over, it was windy, it was raining, it wasn't 24 hours removed from the night before and it didn't seem the time for false hustle. But I was for anything that would keep the peace.

Who knew that sometimes the idiots sitting behind you know what they're talking about?

It was my last night in Mezzanine and my last game with Laurie, a cult figure among longstanding FAFIF readers for the way she leads with her heart and throws emotional elbows. I assure you it's not intentional on her part. She just doesn't understand how a person can support a team by telling its components how worthless they are. Nothing gets Laurie down like the fans who seem to come to Shea to boo the Mets. From the wrong angle, it sounds like she's harping. When you've shared as many Shea armrests over as many Shea seasons as I have with Laurie, you know it's her own strain of unconditional Met love. Some people who know her only from her comments here ask me “what's Laurie like?” I can truthfully respond, à la Choo Choo Coleman, Laurie likes the Mets, bub.

Likes them a lot, like I do. But neither of us is so blinded by our passion that we thought we were looking at anything but a drenching and a beating Thursday.

We determined early in the evening that the Mets were screwed, that every time Wright or Church did anything positive at bat we'd be driven to think “where was that last night?” We decided “last night” — Wednesday when Daniel Murphy was glued to third by three insidiously sticky unproductive outs — would become That Night in Metspeak, that in 2010 or 2015 or whenever a leadoff runner stood in serious scoring position and the heart of the lineup failed to lift as much as a sac fly, we'd instinctively say “it's just like That Night against the Cubs.” That Night would join the pantheon of pitiful patois: Pendleton, bases-loaded walk, devastated. That Night would require no explanation for anyone who lived through it.

That Night is now maybe nothing more than the night before whatever we wind up calling this one. Maybe it's when this night combines with That Night and they became Those Nights against the Cubs in late September 2008, the nights when first we were dead but then we weren't.

Then again, something else could take hold.

The Comeback Game?

The Best Rain Game Since Ventura?

The Last Pedro Game?

The Dreaded Micah Hoffpauir Game?

The Ryan Church Slide Game?

The Robinson Cancel/Ramon Martinez Game?

The Beltran Walkoff Single Game?

The game that set the stage for Shea Stadium to continue its life beyond what it was originally allotted or what seemed remotely possible?

For me right now, it goes down as the night we were all in this together; another night when I was right in the middle of it; the top of the stretch run of the month when I couldn't resist the temptation to inhabit a world of my own and make it my home sweet home; a night when I couldn't have received a better ending not just to a crucial contest in the standings but to the Shea segment of one of my foundation Met relationships. Or it could be that it's simply the night the winning hit spurred me to lift my diminutive friend Laurie several feet in the air for the last time at Shea Stadium — the first time I'd acted on such uninhibited instinct since Benny Agbayani let the dogs out against Aaron Fultz.

I only do things like that on extraordinarily special occasions.

What if the Mets survive, but none of us do?

This is heart-attack stuff, brutal baseball in brutal weather, a Nor'Easter of cruelty and joy and panic and hope buffeting you and threatening to blow you down altogether. How many moments did that game offer to pierce the heart, whether with ecstacy or misery? It started with the look in Pedro Martinez's eyes as the first inning once again frayed and unraveled, a look I hadn't seen before — a grim awareness that the end of the road is in sight. There was Pedro gamely hanging in there despite all that against Micah Hoffpauir and the Iowa Cubs, then acknowledging the fans who were acknowledging him, who were remembering all he once was, all he would be still if only the fragile body could obey the steely mind, and all he did to bring this franchise back to respectability. And then there was Ricardo Rincon restoring the fans' usual state of mind by instantly and irrevocably giving up a monster shot to Hoffpauir. Nice moment? Not for your September 2008 Mets.

By the way — Micah Hoffpauir? Between the name and the chin beard, it's like an extra from Witness walked away from the barn-raising to try his hand at this English sport Harrison Ford kept rattling on about. Oh, and with Hoffpauir and Pie and Fontenot and Fukudome and McGehee and Theriot, these Cubs must give copy editors and public-address announcers alike night sweats.

(The Pirates just gave up a walk-off grand slam. Fuck.)

If our Mets live hard, though, they also die hard. You'd think the combination of a no-outs, man on third in the ninth debacle and instant arson a night later might have killed them — for a while there tonight, I certainly feared it had killed me. (And try not to remember that if Wright had hit a sac fly, we'd be tied for first right now.) But they fought back yet again, and man, that bottom of the eighth was one of those frames that keeps you watching game after hopeless game on summer afternoons when you've got things to do and when they're in extra innings on the West Coast and it's 2:30 a.m. and when you're in the park and it's 48 degrees and they're out of cocoa.

Because you never know.

Because sometimes, as the rain comes down remorselessly and the wind bends and bows everything in sight, Beltran gets a two-out hit and Church gets another two-out hit and Ramon Martinez, who a few weeks ago occupied the Mariana Trench on the second-base depth chart, gets a two-out hit and then Robinson Cancel, who's pretty much the Ramon Martinez of backup catchers, gets a two-out hit only Ryan Church is clearly going to be out at home by a country mile but he takes a desperate detour around Koyie Hill (there's another name to reduce the sports desk to tears) and misses the plate and there's a terrifying, apparently endless moment during which Church is neither safe nor out and then he stretches his hand out onto the plate just before Hill gets there and THE SCORE IS TIED!

Yes, sometimes that happens.

And then sometimes the bullpen doesn't blow it, even though Pedro Feliciano tries and Joe Smith has to face lefty after lefty. And sometimes Jose Reyes harnesses his wild energy for a marvelously determined, disciplined at-bat, and even though Daniel Murphy botches a bunting assignment or a hit-and-run or whatever that was (because something sure got botched) and David Wright is squeezing his bat to splinters again when he needs to let the game come to him, Carlos Beltran will be there. And Carlos Beltran will wait for his pitch and hit a ball on the screws and we'll see that Micah Hoffpauir's seemingly bottomless bag of tricks does not presently include stupendous defense.

Let us pause for a moment, by the way, and bottle this game to break out when people next speak ill of Beltran. He's playing with a bad left knee and aching ribs from that battering against the outfield wall Monday night. He's missed exactly one game all year. He's over 100 RBI for the third-straight year. (Tip of the cap to Jack Curry for a nice profile in the Times the other day.) Beltran's amazing physical gifts, superb instincts and placid demeanor can trick you into thinking he's not going all out, particularly when you compare him with heart-on-the-sleeve grinders like Wright or Murphy. But that's an illusion, one we should be wise enough to see through. Beltran is our Roberto Clemente — a player who was criticized for his temperament and incessant aches and pains and never truly appreciated the way he should have been. We know we're lucky to have him after a game like tonight's; we should remember it when he glides over to make a catch in left-center that we think is easy only because he made it look that way.

And so. We have survived. Survived to confront, yet again, who we are. It's daunting, no question. We've got no bullpen, we don't know who the hell will start Saturday, we don't know if we'll even get to play Friday. Or Saturday. Or even Sunday. Our enemies include Marlins, Phillies, Brewers, wind, rain, 2007 and ourselves. But what the hell. We've come this far, haven't we?

Sometimes in the winter I'll be doing some household chore and I'll realize that for the last five or 10 minutes I've been brooding about a moment from the Mets' past, turning it over and over in my mind and wondering how everything could have gone so wrong. Sometimes I even catch myself muttering imprecations, with whatever I've been doing sidetracked by sour anger and regret.

It's a list that won't surprise you.

Rogers throwing ball four. Pendleton hitting it over the fence. Carter giving Hershiser a despairing glance as he packs his catching gear. Armando walking Paul O'Neill. Payton trying to take third. Luis Sojo's ball trickling up the middle. Glavine hitting Dontrelle Willis. Piazza's drive dying in the air. Brian Jordan taking Benitez deep. Brian Jordan taking Franco deep. Timo celebrating when he should be running. Beltran looking at strike three.

Should the Mets not survive to see October baseball, as looks increasingly likely, I'll have one more for the roster.

Murphy at third. None out. The Phillies have lost.

I was out for a farewell get-together with friends and former colleagues from the Online Journal. But, to the surprise of absolutely no one, I had my radio. For most of the night I'd just check in now and again: 1-0 Cubs on a DeRosa home run. 5-1 Mets, even though they only have two hits! Uh-oh, it's 5-3. Oh no, it's 5-5.

I didn't hear Murphy's triple, but my old Daily Fix partner Carl told me what had happened as I put a headphone in one ear. He stared at pitch locations on his Blackberry while I stood at the head of our table, listening to the game and acting out what I heard. It was a rather grim pantomime: Strike three on Wright. Four wide on purpose to each of the Carloses. Little bouncer by Church, Murphy out at home. Strike three on Castro. A sequence that may wind up seared into my brain for a long, long time.

“I can't believe we lost that game,” was the last thing I said to Emily before falling asleep.

“I can't believe we lost that game,” was the first thing I said to Emily when I woke up.

She noticed. But she hadn't heard all the times I muttered it to myself in the middle of the night, waking up to realize it was still true. And should the Mets fail, she won't hear many of the times I'll mutter it to myself in winters to come.

Murphy at third. None out. The Phillies have lost. I can't believe we lost that game.

Another summer at Perry’s. I can’t. I swear.
—Stacy Hamilton, Ridgemont High School, 1982

I will not tell you how dreadful Wednesday night’s loss to the Cubs was. You can infer that for yourself; you probably already have. I will not dwell on the eerie fact that at the exact same juncture in 2007 — the 158th game, a Wednesday — the Mets also scored five early runs and also lost 9-6. I won’t even try to sell you on the notion that you can have a spectacularly great time in Shea Stadium’s Picnic Area with some incredibly wonderful people up to if not including the moment Daniel Murphy is stranded on third base in a tie game in the ninth inning after having arrived there with nobody out. I did have a great time until I had a horrible time Wednesday. Since you presumably only had a horrible time watching the Mets disintegrate, I won’t bother you with what I managed to enjoy before all manner of my anatomy was tasered by failure.

Instead, I have something more cheerful for everybody.

***

Forget everything you know about the 45 years that followed April 17, 1964.

Forget how the bright and broad hopes of a toddler franchise and its newborn ballpark fell away into something dreary and dismal as the ballpark was condemned and the franchise operated in farce.

Forget that Shea Stadium was home to the worst collapse in baseball history one year and a paler yet somehow sharper sequel the next (Janeane Garafolo once recommended never going to see a movie whose trailer features the line “how the could the same thing happen to the same guy TWICE?”).

Forget that 1986 was 22 years ago.

Forget that the same people who have been begging you to indulge in a Final Season celebration will effortlessly shift gears any moment now to emphasize there’s nothing like Inaugural Season merchandise to make your life complete.

Forget how mad you are at the Mets this morning, or how sullen they’ve made you or how upset you were when Wright lunged to swing at ball four and Church tapped out and Castro waved at a pitch in his eyes and Ayala couldn’t hold off the Cubs forever and Oliver Perez couldn’t have come up smaller and there’s still no bullpen and now there’s no righthanded bench and the Phillies lost and we couldn’t take advantage and the Brewers won and they’ve probably bottomed out and the Mets and only the Mets would find a way to ruin the last day ever in their ballpark by getting themselves knocked out of playoff contention in incredibly embarrassing fashion for a second consecutive year, two epic episodes of exacerbation which occurred/are occurring on the heels of a heartbreaking National League Championship Series defeat that — by comparison to what’s happened since — can be referred to with a straight face as the good old days.

Forget that.

Remember what Shea was like when it opened and how happy we were to see it. I mean we as a people since not so many of us were around and watching on April 17, 1964. If you want to feel the love, go not to Bermuda, but to Bob Murphy. Our Murph called the first half-inning in Shea Stadium history 44 years, five months and a week or so ago. My friend Joe Dubin gave me a copy of the broadcast a while back and I’ve listened to it several times. It’s a marvel. As a Shea farewell gift to all of us, I have transcribed that first half-inning.

Thus, you can do what was impossible to do when Wednesday night ended…

Enjoy.

***

From beautiful Shea Stadium in Flushing, New York, the New York Mets are on the air.

Well, hi everybody, this is Bob Murphy with Lindsey Nelson and Ralph Kiner, all set to detail every exciting moment of the historic opening of Shea Stadium as the New York Mets meet the Pittsburgh Pirates. Today’s game is brought to you by Rheingold Extra Dry and Viceroy Cigarettes.

Well, we hope you have plenty of Rheingold Extra Dry on hand. You’ll enjoy today’s game even more wherever you’re listening along the Rheingold beat. Rheingold is as good to your taste as it is to your thirst, Rheingold after Rheingold. Smoother, crisper, livelier.

Bob kicks it to Lindsey who, as on-field emcee, promises “the proper traditional sendoff” to the home season: the singing of the national anthem by “that star-spangled baritone of the Metropolitan Opera,” Robert Merrill, backed by the City of New York Department of Sanitation band. It’s the “one song dear to the hearts of all of us.” After a break, Bob is back.

Casey, near home plate, his ball club on the first base line; Danny Murtaugh and the Pittsburgh Pirates on the third base line.

This game might very well be a complete sellout. Right now, there appears to be still some seats available in the Upper Deck, but on this beautiful, almost unbelievably good day, it is going to be very close to a capacity crowd of fifty-five thousand three-hundred.

Ninety-six percent of the seats are within the foul lines, you’ve gotta see this stadium. Every seat is a beautifully painted individual seat, the stadium, which is five-tiered in a horseshoe form, is open on the centerfield end. The giant Rheingold scoreboard is over in right-centerfield. The green batter’s eye, straight away, out behind the low fence, four hundred and ten feet away. The only thing to be seen in left-centerfield, other than the cars across the way in the parking lot, are giant light standards.

There are only two light standards, they are both in the outfield, one in left center and the other in right center. The rest of the lighting, and it is almost unbelievable, it is almost as bright as day if not brighter, comes from the cantilevered lighting under the very top of Shea Stadium.

We then hear the anthem. Then Murph.

Well, just about everything has been taken care of, Bill Mazeroski, Pirate captain, with the lineup slip, Casey Stengel there along with Mazeroski. The umpires today, Tom Gorman behind the plate, he’s the crew chief of this fine umpiring team, Billy Williams will be at first base, Vinnie Smith umpiring at second and Chris Pelekoudas will be the umpire at third.

Jack Fisher throwing in his final warmup tosses on the mound. Setting up the Mets defensively, the first baseman is Tim Harkness, Larry Burright at second, Sammy Samuel at short and Ron Hunt will be at third.

In the outfield, Frank Thomas in left, Jim Hickman in center, around in right field George Altman. Jack Fisher on the mound and behind the plate, Jesse Gonder.

On the coaching lines, Mickey Vernon, former Washington manager, coaching at first base for Danny Murtaugh, and Frank Oceak will be on the coaching lines at third.

And the leadoff batter in the ballgame is Dick Schofield, switch-hitting shortstop of the Pirates, and ladies and gentlemen, we’re ready to go.

You can imagine there must be a lump in the throat of twenty-five year-old Jack Fisher, the Frostburg, Maryland native as he looks in the for the first sign ever taken in the twenty-five million dollar ballpark named Shea Stadium.

This is it.

Jack Fisher is into his windup and here’s the first pitch ever…a strike on the outside corner.

The roar comes up as the first pitch ever thrown in this beautiful baseball palace is over. Perhaps the tension now is broken, and the game is underway.

Jesse Gonder walking slowly, back toward the mound. Out in the outfield, the outfielders are checking their sunglasses; the breeze not really too much of a factor in the game, kind of blowing diagonally from right across toward left.

Three hundred and forty one feet down the foul lines to the wall. The ballpark is symmetrical. Three fifty-eight in left center and right center.

Here’s the pitch on the way, a curve inside and low, one ball and one strike.

The dimensions of the ballpark as the fence swings out, three fifty-eight in straight left, three seventy-one in left center, out near center three ninety-six and four hundred and ten feet in straightaway centerfield.

Next pitch thrown, and he pops the ball up to short center field, running back is Larry Burright, Burright getting to it, makes the catch.

One away and nobody on, we’re in the top half of inning number one, just underway on a historic day. Now the hitter is Bill Virdon, the centerfielder.

Bill, veteran outfielder, one of the outstanding ballhawks in the major leagues, has two hits in eleven times at bat in the first two Pirate games.

Now Ron Hunt shortens up at third against Virdon, a lefthand hitter, to guard against the possibility of the bunt. Here’s the pitch on the way, strike called, a fastball on the inside corner.

Sammy Samuel, the shortstop, shaded toward second against Bill Virdon, the right side of the infield back deep.

Now the windup, pitch by Jack, a curve, foul, back into the crowd and there’s the first souvenir. Kind of a soft foul ball, wafted back into the field boxes, and the gentleman who gets the coveted souvenir is also given a hand.

He can say “I caught the first foul ball ever caught by a fan in Shea Stadium.”

Now a two-strike count on Bill Virdon. Now the windup, and the pitch by Fisher…slow ground ball to third, charging in is Ron Hunt, barehanded pickup, the peg…he got him!

Good fielding by Ron Hunt, that was one of those topped slow rollers. Hunt had to come in at full-speed, pick the ball up with his bare hand, fire all in that same motion and he got him.

Now two outs and nobody on, one of the top hitters in the National League, Roberto Clemente. And Roberto off to a fast start with four-for-eleven in two games, hitting at three sixty-four.

Clemente a righthand hitter, real good bad-ball hitter and he has a lot of power to the opposite field.

Curve is over at the knees, strike one.

Last year, Roberto hit three-twenty. Had seventy-six runs batted in. Without a doubt, one of the best ballplayers ever acquired in the baseball draft.

A little under the knees, one ball and one strike.

Well, this is certainly some kind of a day. We’re sorry you couldn’t be with us, the excitement almost unbelievable. Tremendous crowd, I think by the time everybody settles down, it’ll be very close to a capacity.

Now Fisher out of his windup, the pitch to Clemente, lined hard, but it will be foul deep down the leftfield line.

In Shea Stadium, not too much room in foul territory. The distance from home plate to the backstop not nearly as large as in some major league ballparks, a fact that will not please the pitchers, but will please the catcher.

One ball and two strikes to Roberto Clemente, two outs and nobody on. In comes the pitch.

Reached for and fouled toward the Upper Deck and it’ll be out of play. And that one goes all the way to the Upper Deck!

You gotta hit a ball pretty high to spin it all the way to that upper tier.

And ringing around beautiful Shea Stadium, the five-tiered, twenty-five million dollar ballpark, we see many of the familiar “Let’s Go Mets” banners.

I have a feeling that a lot of the airplanes in the area are taking a purposeful trip over the stadium today to give the people a chance to see it. And you can’t blame ’em.

Now one and two the count on Roberto Clemente. Now Jack Fisher over the head, down comes the pitch, in the dirt, scooped out by Jesse Gonder, and the count even, two balls and two strikes.

Gonder did an outstanding defensive job behind the plate catching Tracy Stallard in the Wednesday night game in Philadelphia. Stallard pitched out of one tremendous jam when he had a runner on third and only one man out. He was trying…going for the strikeout and Gonder, not once but upon three occasions, came up with that curveball down in the dirt.

Now Fisher winds for the two-two delivery…a swing and a miss, he struck him out!

No runs, no hits, no errors, none left on. And the score in the middle of the first inning, the Pittsburgh Pirates nothing and the New York Mets coming to bat.

Well, this is the big one, no doubt about it. This is the one we’ve been talking about, dreaming about, waiting for. Opening Day at Shea Stadium!

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***

So it went on that Opening Day of Opening Days (and can’t you just feel April when you read that and put it to Murph’s voice?). We’d learn in the bottom of the first that official scorer Dick Young is one of the most talented sportswriters in the country; that the 9,000 field boxes sit on tracks so they can be rolled around for Jets games and become 50-yard-line seats; that there are some problems with the big message board in right-center and it will no doubt take two or three games to work out the kinks. The only thing missing from Bob’s, Lindsey’s and Ralph’s broadcast of the Pirates’ 4-3 win that day was a two-word phrase: Polo Grounds. Not once did they mention where the Mets had played in 1962 and 1963. They were not selling the past. They were selling the future, a time when 96% of seats were between the foul lines…a share that must have dipped a tad with the eventual erection and subsequent expansion of the Picnic Area, which is where I saw the hope seep out of the 2008 season Wednesday night. I suppose it’s understandable that all the emphasis on April 17, 1964 would be not on what was lost, but what was found, namely an unbelievable ballpark.

And in four days, this place that made its debut 473 days after I did is scheduled to be no more. That stark reality, above and beyond the breathtaking futility of these past two Septembers even, is as unbelievable as anything I know about Shea Stadium.