Field Level was always aspirational. It was the part of Shea you saw on TV, the part of Shea closest to the Mets, the part of Shea that was listed first when you thought about buying tickets. Beginning in the middle of 1980, it was flaming orange, which gave it cachet (or ca-Shea) to burn.

That said, Field Level was not necessarily the best seat in the house. It could be in a given location, but when it wasn't, and you found your neck in a constant state of crane, it was no more outstanding than the right Loge, Mezzanine or perfectly positioned Upper Deck slot. What Field Level always had going for it was it was the only one of the four primary levels of Shea Stadium where they made a point of keeping you out.

Field Level was the most exclusive normal part of Shea. Forget the Diamond View Suites and the Picnic Area. We know those were designed to be off limits. But Field Level was just seats for a Mets game. There were days when for a reasonable incremental investment, I could purchase them out at the ticket window. What if I didn't? What if they weren't available? What if I just wanted to come down to say hello to somebody? Or what if I wanted to buy something to eat or to wear that was sold only there?

Oh, I was so not getting in.

Wednesday night, I sat in Field Level for the final final time. Twice this season I assumed my orange ass-quaintanceship was over, that every time I had gotten in was a fluke. But one friend, with his mitts intermittently on the third base box of a company whose sole business as far as I can tell is to maintain four seats it never uses, kept making encores happen for me. He invited me to join him five separate times in 2008 and arranged for me to forge an unforgettable reunion a sixth time. I am extraordinarily grateful to this gentleman and urge you to consider buying every one of his Mets books if you haven't already (not because they're swell seats, but because they're good books). Anyway, Matt Silverman brought me into the orange circle for a last look around last night and it didn't disappoint.

The things you notice when you sit about a dozen rows from the field in a seat whose number is even and a little under 100:

• Balls down the line, their fairness and their foulness.

• The Pepsi Party Patrol girls smiling like they mean it when they dance on the visitors dugout. (I've been at Shea so much lately that I've come to know their names from their nightly DiamondVision turn…and have come to believe Crystal has an Aunt Sarah in Alaska.)

• Third base coaches are not hired for their athletic body types.

• How much camaraderie there is between opposing players before first pitch (except, apparently, between Elijah Dukes and human beings).

• The desperation on outfielders' faces when a dying quail approaches.

• How determined David Wright is to catch everything.

• How safe Jose Reyes is when he sets a record.

• Your leaning forward is bad news for the patron to your left.

• One person stands, everybody is screwed.

• Less maneuvering room than that which exists in Row Q of the Upper Deck. If the most petite of Olympic gymnasts would be physically challenged by the logistics of pulling a bag out from under an orange Shea seat, what hope have I?

• Cupholders!

• Too many people tap away on PDAs during ballgames for which their tickets were too expensive to somebody.

• There is little awareness by people who get up to get something or come back with that same something during critical pitches in crucial at-bats (though that, like the Palms and the BlackBerrys, is true in Mezzanine and everywhere else in the industrialized world).

• Field Level wasn't designed for waiter or waitress service. It's barely designed for vendors.

• An oversampling, by Shea standards, of older fans; those who can't as easily make the trip upstairs; probably prosperous fans who are the ones who can (or could) afford season tickets; loyal fans whose nameplates have been in place since way before any of the current nameplates over the clubhouse lockers were applied.

• Teens who are given somebody's unwanted tickets for a night don't really get how lucky they are.

• Kids who probably think this is where you always get to sit.

• At least one men's room is pimped out with space age urinals — like something out of a MolliCoolz brochure — and features both hand driers and towel dispensers (packing towels no less!).

• You're still not getting a ball. Not a pop fly, not a pity toss. It's never going to happen.

• There is an inevitable foot traffic bottleneck right behind home plate in the concourse just as there is in the Upper Deck. In this sense, Shea Stadium inconveniences everybody equally.

Now and then in my Field Level seatings I have to confess I've looked up at a relatively full stadium and thought how odd it is that people are sitting elsewhere. Don't they know this is the place to be? To be fair and unelitist, I've flipped the equation. Upper Deck is God's Country! Those swells don't know what they're missing! But the Field Level seats, in theory anyway, are different from yours and mine. Like I said, not always better, occasionally around the corners worse, but definitely different.

I laughed to myself when on the final concession stroll of my Field Level career I landed in right, at the “food court” outpost that sells brisket (it was my 34th game of the year — I'm running out of things I haven't tried). I laughed because I knew that I would have to show my ticket to get back to the concourse. It was the sixth inning, the Heilman frame as they call it in bowling. I'd be carrying a sandwich. Where the hell else would I be headed but to my seat? But I would have to prove it in a way I wouldn't have to in Loge or Mezzanine or Upper Deck. With not a dozen regular-season games remaining, the reins remain tight on Field Level. A guard is stationed to keep you out in 2008 as a guard presumably was in 1964, as a guard has always been to my recollection.

I indeed had to show my ticket. I laughed again.

It's nice down there, y'know? It's nice because you don't get down there much and it's nice because there's a game going on nearby. But it's not that nice that it needed to be informed by the aura of a restricted country club. If I look forward to one thing about World Class Citi Field it's that the Mets have declared you can get up and walk where you want like an adult and not be eyeballed, frisked and inspected for proper credentials. They told us this at the World Class Citi Field Preview Center last September. They volunteered it, as if they understood how inane their standing policy had been for 44 seasons. But here in the 45th season, they keep it up to Shea's dying day. As fan/guest/customer relations told me ages ago when I protested, “It's policy.”

Barring a postseason miracle (hey — I see one victory balloon before this thing is called and…yeah, you better run), I'll take in the rest of my Shea viewing from other vantage points. I won't be able to flash that golden ticket. I won't be one of the chosen thousands allowed to ante up for sushi on a whim. I will have to argue with somebody in an orange golf shirt or blue windbreaker if I want to partake of one more California roll for the road. I almost absolutely surely said sayonara to my beloved Daruma last night. It was tougher, I swear, than watching Pelfrey and the pen surrender ten runs to the freaking Nationals.

Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. All I ever craved was unfettered access to the only sushi stand at Shea Stadium.

And to think it seemed mildly insane to have an off-day after a two-game series. After whatever the hell just happened for the last two nights, we could all use a week listening quietly to whale songs in a warm bath in a dim, candlelit room.

Worry of the moment: What if we make it to October and everybody's arms are on E? In this current turn through the rotation, Pedro has looked ordinary and both Ollie and Pelf have been awful. You'll find Aaron Heilman under that heading as well, as per usual, but tonight he was joined by the normally stalwart Brian Stokes, who couldn't locate anything but his fastball and found that wasn't enough. Joe Smith was impeccable (with a lot of help from David Wright), as was Luis Ayala, but when it was 7-1 Mets the devout hope was that tonight's blog entry would be a meditation on the long-delayed debut of Bobby Parnell, instead of more hosannas for guys who could have used a breather. As if. It makes sense that Parnell's baptism has been kept on hold pending a blowout, but there's no such thing as a blowout when the Mets are involved these days.

But still. Let's hope we wind up having October to worry about. If Wright hits the way he did tonight, that would be a big help getting us there — and would further build his legend. By now it's a famous story that David accelerated his rise to the big leagues by working less hard, learning not to exhaust himself in St. Lucie pregame. So it was a bit scary to see him out there yesterday afternoon in the batting cage, taking extra hacks with both Howard Johnson and Jerry Manuel offering counsel. But Wright seems to thrive on not doing things the easy way — he's like John Henry with a bat, convinced that even more hard work is the best way to break down whatever barrier's come between him and what he can do. Yet he's often right — when talk radio begins to buzz about how tired he looks, you know a big game is coming. So of course extra BP, instead of tying his mind into even more of a knot, was a preview of a 4-for-4 night and a home run on a nice, line-drive swing that gave us enough insurance to downgrade tonight's game from nightmarish to merely scary. And while it would take a truly magnanimous Met fan to say Wright deserved a Gold Glove last year, this year it would take a truly mean-spirited one to say he doesn't. In the late innings tonight Wright's glove — and sometimes just his bare hand — seemed to be all that separated us from disaster.

If the Mets are showing the kind of pluck and patience they sorely lacked a September ago, the Nats seem like a rowdy study hall that's stopped respecting Mr. Acta's authority. The talent is there — Ryan Zimmerman, Lastings Milledge and the somehow-resurrected Cristian Guzman have obvious firepower, and Elijah Dukes is nothing less than a force of nature, primal rage constantly boiling out of a vessel too flawed to contain it. But the Nats lost in no small part because they kept aiming the gun at their own feet. Exactly how many lineouts to center does Milledge have to convert into hits before he plays at normal depth? (Cracked Keith: “He looks like he's out there to pull the number off the wall.”) What lesson is learned when Dukes takes several hours to leave the field after a groundout, delaying his exit further to incite an already-hostile crowd? What makes Anderson Hernandez think he can automatically get time with Ayala nearly in his windup after the Nats took forever to get him up to the plate with an out to go? Then there was the surreal sight of no less than seven men converging on first base at high speed after Damion Easley popped up and left Fernando Tatis scrambling on the wrong side of second in the fifth. Who would get there first? Tatis? Easley? Kory Casto? Emilio Bonifacio? Garrett Mock? Wil Nieves? The first-base ump? Somehow none of them collided, and somehow Tatis managed to find first before anyone in the gray and navy scrum could. Nieves' amazed disgust at the blown play at his feet told you everything you need to know about the Nats' 2008 — yes, they're young and it's been a long slog, but the lack of discipline on the field was startling.

Greg was in the park tonight; so were Emily and her dad. (As the Nats stumbled around in the seventh, I text-messaged NO DAIRY QUEEN FOR ANY OF YOU!!! to her, a household joke borrowed and transformed from a wistful quote about a long-ago playoff game.) For attending they got 23 runs' worth of offense, a pretty nice night with a hint of autumn (which of course hints at autumn baseball), and generous portions of joy and terror. But they missed a great show by Gary, Ron and Keith. There was Keith's crack about Milledge, Darling's dry assessment of Pelfrey making Dukes fish after Elijah's mini-eruption (“fastball in, slider away — it's worked for a hundred years”), and Gary's observation in the bottom of the eighth that 11-10 would be a fitting final score for the Nats' last appearance at Shea Stadium, since the Montreal Expos began their existence with an 11-10 win there on Opening Day in 1969. As a collective those three — and Howie Rose on the radio side — are not only great play-by-play guys and top-notch analysts, but also Met historians of the highest rank. We should all of us spend a few weeks listening to lesser announcers chronicle our team, just to remind us how lucky we are. (Hmm. How about October?)

Granted, none of us much minded that Wright's home run made it 13-10 and so spoiled Gary's symmetry. Just as we may find a strange comfort in the fact that the Mets again have 17 to play but find themselves 3.5 games ahead, not seven.

We have half the lead we had last year. Fine. We also have twice the team.

Maybe you've heard: We supposedly have an easy schedule the rest of the way. Four with the Cubs, yeah, but they could well have wrapped things up by then, and the rest is all the dregs of the National League East.

Well, beyond the elementary fact that we're Met fans and so never assume anything is gift-wrapped for us, we know better. There can be no tougher opponent than a team that's out of it and is sending out young players trying to earn their spurs for next year — pitchers you've never seen and a lineup of guys handed the added incentive of a chance to derail someone else's postseason aspirations. The Nationals and Marlins played a key role in sending us to our doom in 2007, and the Braves may have been eliminated tonight but they still have Bobby Cox and Chipper Jones, which is nightmare fuel enough. Whatever the standings say, it gives me no pleasure whatsoever to see all those WSHs and ATLs and FLAs awaiting us. (Same warning applies for the Phils, about whom more in a moment — they've got essentially the same schedule, except their four-spot comes against the Brewers.)

For three and a half innings tonight, it was like a bad dream of September 2007. There was David Wright battling himself, Oliver Perez pitching like a spooked horse, and the Nationals rising up in indignation in the top of the fourth after the Mets took a 5-2 lead. Walk, strikeout, single, single, single, single, single, single, walk and finally a merciful but awfully late GIDP. While first Oliver and then Nelson Figueroa ducked and covered, there was Anderson Hernandez trying to prove to us that he could too hit, and Lastings Milledge looking for vengeance, and Ryan Zimmerman back from the dead and looking far too alive for my tastes, and the horrid Aaron Boone and various Anonynats and I swear they were hitting for about two days. 5-2 Mets turned into 7-5 Nats, and only the absence of Willie Randolph standing at the dugout railing like Captain Ahab assured me that it wasn't, in fact, 2007.

But you know what else was different?

Brian Schneider led off the bottom of the fourth with a single.

Seems like a little thing, but it mattered: Rather than looking unmanned and undone, the Mets came right back, putting together a rally on two singles and a groundout to tie the game. Yes, Fernando Tatis popped up with two outs and the bases loaded, but the counterpunch was enough to send the demons away.

OK, so in the top of the fifth the Nats retook the lead against an ineffective Brandon Knight. Guess what? Damion Easley led off the bottom of the fifth by drawing a walk. That didn't lead to a run, but, again, it was enough to serve as an exorcism. The Mets weren't panicking, but working good counts and turning in good at-bats. And eventually, one of Manny Acta's moves backfired under that pressure: He brought in Charlie Manning to turn around Carlos Beltran and neutralize Carlos Delgado, and the first Carlos slammed a two-run homer for the lead and the second Carlos sent a mortar off the K board above the relievers' heads. 10-8 Mets, and between peerless relief and nice defense from Damion Easley and Wright (whose offensive struggles have been invisible in the field), we got it to Luis Ayala, who went 1-2-3 against the team that cast him aside as a failed mop-up guy.

Do we lose this game in 2007? Of course we do — we lost this game twice against the Nats a year ago, along with three others that were thoroughly nauseating in other ways. (Don't click those links if you've got a bad heart, a weak stomach, or both.) But that was last year: 10-8 isn't normally a thing of beauty, but it was beautiful tonight.

And maybe there's magic in that untidy score: For a few minutes later and 100-odd miles south, Matt Lindstrom got Pat Burrell to whack a 2-0 pitch to center for the final out of a 10-8 Marlins win.

None of this ensures anything — I don't need to be reminded that those 2007 Mets started September 8-1. But it ensured tonight, and that's more than enough until the next tonight.

Well, as Greg already told you, now it's official: Billy Wagner is facing Tommy John surgery.

This sad news doesn't change much about how I feel about this unlikely September and potential October: I never thought we'd get this far, and finding ourselves in a pennant race is happy surprise enough that anything else will be gravy. And kudos to Jerry Manuel for managing a dicey bullpen in ways Willie Randolph never could have. Willie would have immediately installed a new closer, stuck guys in roles where they might or might not have fit, and stuck to that plan through thin and thin, grimly insisting he had faith in his guys and things would turn around. Jerry has been open with the media, the fans and (by every indication) the players themselves: He's making things up as he goes, at this point in the season winning ballgames is everything, and anybody who wears his uniform will have to be ready to do whatever's asked. We've been without Billy Wagner for more than a month, with Luis Ayala the closer by default rather than declaration and the entire supporting cast on hand as understudies. For the most part, it's worked. Can it work for another seven-odd weeks? Heck if I know. We'll find out soon enough.

But before we plunge back into the terrors and joys of a pennant race, a moment for Billy Wagner. He's never gotten his due in New York, which is partly the nature of the town and partly life as a closer. It's by no means uncommon for pitchers to spin out of control for 10 to 15 hideous innings before regaining their equilibrium, but such a stretch is very different for starters and relievers. If you're in the rotation, that's two or three bad outings; if you're a closer, it can be five or six wins converted into losses, attended by the same number of vitriolic back pages and hours of talk-radio screaming.

The cliche of closers is that to survive they develop very short memories. But I always had the feeling Wagner didn't do it that way — that he actually had a long memory, one that preserved every failure and slight, and that he survived by being tougher than most any of us could imagine having to be.

Wagner's story sounds like fiction, but it isn't: He was born to teenage parents in dirt-poor Appalachian Virginia, and passed among relatives throughout his childhood, attending 11 schools in 10 years as caretakers came and went, struggling with hunger and the shame of food stamps. (He co-founded the Second Chance Learning Center, which offers academic and emotional counseling for at-risk kids in southwestern Virginia, and you better believe his work there means far more to him than some athletes' tax shelters do to them.) In school Wagner poured his rage and hurt into sports, firing balls at targets and firing himself at enemy football players. He became a lefty after he broke his right arm — for the second time — and grew into a schoolboy legend, at one point fanning 19 batters out of 21 faced. But nobody in pro ball cared: Sure, he was a lefty who already threw 85, but he was 5-3, weighed 130 pounds and lived in an American backwater where you were derided on the rare occasions you were noticed at all. No scout even came to see him until he went to college and shattered NCAA strikeout records — and had filled out enough to escape baseball prejudices.

Wagner finally found a father figure in college — the father of the woman he'd marry. The day after the Astros put him on the 40-man roster, his father-in-law and his wife's stepmother were shot to death in front of the stepmother's six-year-old boy. That winter, with the trial looming, the Astros tried to strong-arm him into going to winter ball in Venezuela, hinting that his roster spot could be in danger. Wagner replied that he needed to be with his family, and there were 20-odd teams who'd be interested in him if the Astros weren't. Compared to that, what's Pat Burrell thinking you're a rat or Met teammates angry that you called them out for being away from their lockers?

As we all know, Wagner became the Astros' closer, entering games to “Enter Sandman” long before the closer of a certain fourth-place team farther east became identified with the song. That was a long way from southwestern Virginia, but it wasn't exactly easy. In '98 Kelly Stinnett rocketed a line drive off Wagner's skull that left him lying on the mound, legs twitching and blood coming out of one ear. He was back in less than three weeks. In the summer of 2000 he had surgery for a partially torn elbow tendon and was soft-tossing in September.

Wagner's 37 now, and at that age the kind of surgery he's about to have is inevitably and correctly called “career-threatening.” It's possible he'll never pitch again. But I wouldn't dare bet against him. If Wagner doesn't return, it'll be because his body couldn't take it, and not because of any lack of courage or determination. If you doubt that, just go up and read those last few paragraphs again.

That sudden blast of hot wind you may have felt in the New York City area about an hour ago wasn't Tropical Storm Hanna coming back around in the batting order — it was millions of Met fans exhaling.

The math of pennant races is cruel: The Phillies got two stellar pitching performances, put the Mets back on their heels, couldn't complete the sweep and so leave having gained just a game in the standings. Let the record show that in this case, I'm all for cruelty.

The cruelty would have been on us, of course, if Johan Santana and Carlos Delgado hadn't been kind. Those two contributed 116 pretty good pitches and about 870 feet of home runs to the cause, erasing two and a half days of grinding frustration. Now we can forget about Friday night, with Brett Myers throttling us and ball after ball bouncing the Phils' way and Brad Lidge dancing through a hard rain of solid Met at-bats and somehow not getting wet. We can forget about the anxious thumb-twiddling of a soaked Saturday, with pennant races reserved for drier climes. And we can forget about Sunday's first game, where the weather was gorgeous and everything else was hideous.

If you're feeling magnanimous, you can admit a game like yesterday's matinee was lurking in the cards somewhere. Smacking Jamie Moyer around a couple of weeks ago was the exception to the usual rule (and didn't get us anything), so it made sense that for a long time the only thing standing between us and the potential humiliation of being no-hit was a bunt single from a rhinoceros-sized catcher. (Comparison animal not chosen idly: As with rhinos, Robinson Cancel is faster than you think. By the way, has anyone ever won 243 games more quietly than Moyer?) Meanwhile, the Mets had been remarkably lucky this spring and summer in escaping the logical outcome of bracketing Carlos Beltran with guys who have no particular business playing the outfield. Sunday they weren't so lucky: Fernando Tatis misplayed a fly ball into a double, Jose Reyes neglected the extra duties that the presence of Nick Evans (or Daniel Murphy) put on his plate for a tack-on run, and even Beltran misjudged a ball that should have been caught.

That was difficult to watch, but not wholly unexpected — if one can possibly find perspective when we're playing the Phillies in September. Harder to shrug off was the fact that Pedro Martinez apparently had no problems getting loose, had decent velocity, and it didn't matter. While some of the day's runs should be taken off his ledger due to outfield shenanigans, Pedro looked old and ordinary, and his aura alone is no longer enough to mesmerize an opponent. (Oh by the way, I hate Greg Dobbs even more than he hates us. His swing is apparently perfectly tailored for hitting balls a foot over Shea Stadium fences.)

And so the waiting for the nightcap, with football and anxiety equally unwelcome visitors in the Fry household — and the added burden of hearing that Billy Wagner had walked off the mound after just a dozen or so pitches, the last of which hit poor Gustavo Molina in the ankle and did something worse to Billy's balky forearm. (Oh, and did you hear Tom Brady hurt his knee? Seriously, I think ESPN hollered town criers to spread the word. I'm always bemused that the first true day of football season invariably includes several marquee players sustaining injuries that end their season. Can you imagine if our Opening Day was like this?)

And then the nightcap didn't get off to a great start either, not with Johan's location way off and the Phillies smelling blood in the water. Ugliness seemed imminent. I thought of the possibility of Greg spending 10 hours in Queens in which he'd discover little more than that first place was gone and witnessing six hours of humiliating baseball isn't good for your health.

But the fucking worm was turning, if you'll forgive paraphrasing Joe Torre. Cole Hamels didn't look so good either, and unlike Johan he wouldn't gather himself. And suddenly it was the Mets getting breaks and the Phillies getting unlucky. (Catcher's interference and being out at third but called safe — quite a bottom of the first for David Wright.) Beltran got us even and Delgado began his assault on Hamels, punching a single up the middle. By the time Delgado came up in the third, Santana could direct his change-up properly and I was willing to watch the game from the couch instead of peeking out from under it. (Hey, I said I wasn't scared — I never said I wasn't one anxious sonofabitch.) Delgado helped push that anxiety further away with a moonshot, prompting me to wonder out loud what he had written in his famous composition book afterwards. I imagine it was something like this:

9/7/08 HAMELS, PHI. BOT 3. 0-2 CURVEBALL, CENTER OF PLATE. I HIT IT TO FUCKING MARS.

Which was soon followed by this:

9/7/08 HAMELS, PHI. BOT 5. 0-0 CHANGEUP, HIGH. I HIT IT TO FUCKING JUPITER.

From then on I kept begging for the Mets to score, oh, about five more runs to make me feel vaguely safe. Pedro Feliciano and Brian Stokes did stalwart work after Santana departed, but tell me you weren't freaking out after Luis Ayala singled not one but two ludicrous little worm-killing singles to Shane Victorino and Matt Stairs. Ayala, who'd already disposed of the evil Dobbs, got Andy Tracy (who somehow never played left field for us in the pre-Evans/Murphy farce) to fly out, trading a run for a much-needed out. Up stepped Jimmy Rollins, the count went to 1-2, and I told Emily that whatever was gonna happen, you knew Rollins' at-bat was going to take at least seven pitches, each of them possibly meaning a week off my life.

Ayala promptly fanned Jimmy to end it. Sometimes it's great to be wrong.