Timing, it can not be overstated, is everything. You want to sell something, you want to sell when demand is high. You don't want to be ambling the greater Yorktown area in late 1781 peddling King George commemorative medallions, y'know? So on some level you have to wonder how fortuitous a month October 2007 was for the Mets to put on sale…bricks!

One assumes the timing was meant to be spot on; with the Mets marching through October to greater glory, why wouldn't fans flush with pennant fever want to take advantage of the following offer?

The Citi Field Fanwalk is where Mets fans can become a permanent part of Citi Field through the purchase of individual engraved bricks surrounding the main entry of Citi Field. Fans will be able to recognize their family, friends and favorite Mets moments through lasting tributes engraved directly onto the bricks of the plaza outside of the Jackie Robinson Rotunda.

Obviously putting this sort of expensive “I am a Met, dammit!” trinket on sale shortly after the Mets themselves collapsed into a pile of bricks wasn't what whoever makes these decisions had in mind. If they could have seen what was coming, one imagines the offer would have been pushed up a few weeks, even a few crucial days:

The Tom Glavine Brick is perfect to fire or fling from any section of Shea Stadium should a passionless 300-game winner with the personality of a rock carry the immediate fate of your franchise in his hands come the season's final day and drop it so it smashes into a million little pieces before your team comes to bat. For a small surcharge, you can engrave a personal message of animosity to this poor excuse for a Met so he will be able to recognize exactly who disdains him and why.

But the Marketing Dept. wasn't nearly that creative.

As mets.com describes in detail, your brick, depending on how big it is and how much you want it to say, will cost you between $195 and $395 plus tax and a “convenience fee” of $5 to cover the replica brick you get for your very own home Fanwalk. What's convenient about that? Well, it certainly makes your wallet easier to tote around.

It's impossible to be party to a come-on like this and not roll your eyes. It's also impossible to consider it and think, “well, maybe if I move a few things around, I can find $200 for my brick.” Superfannisheness being what it is, who doesn't crave this ultimate in ÜberMet identification? Hey, I'm part of Citi Field! And not in the way Jimmy Hoffa is allegedly part of Giants Stadium! One of these days, the Mets are gonna walk all over me! As long as intimacy issues dictate that you're not going to be able to get inside Citi Field as often as you'd like*, the least you can do is be permanently outside it.

Yes, I both scoff at this scam and wonder if I should hurry up and get in on it. The immortality aspect of it appeals to our worst and best instincts. There'll be no denying you're a Mets fan if it's there for everybody to see. You are not a front runner if you're on a brick. You're in it for perpetuity. Why, you can be as enduring as Citi Field itself!

Which will be how long exactly?

Those of us who grew up alongside Shea Stadium, who are roughly the same age as the Condemned Man, probably never thought our ballpark would ever come down. But there it is, on the clock, 81 regular-season games to go (I'm not making allowances for postseason in 2008 — not after 2007 I'm not). It's such an accepted fact of life now that it takes some serious thinking to think how seriously stunning it is. In 1964, 1974, 1984, 1994, Shea Stadium was going to be here forever. Even in 2004, as city and team officials dickered into oblivion, it seemed impossible to believe it would be gone. Come 2014, it will be parking.

So how long will your brick remain in place? Maybe long enough so you won't know it won't be there forever? Shea Stadium will have served 45 seasons. Ebbets Field, whose ever mourned demise is eternally on our psychic tab, also gave its team 45 seasons. (The final version of the Polo Grounds put in 47 seasons for the Giants and two more for the Mets, but according to informed sources, the Polo Grounds and the Giants barely existed.) If Citi Field endures in the tradition of its wayward dad and its mythical grandpa, then let's chalk it in for being home to the New York Mets from 2009 to 2053.

If we are to assume baseball and the planet continue to revolve, then what? If Citi Field doesn't stand any more forever than any park besides Fenway and Wrigley, it will be replaced. Maybe in Flushing. Maybe somewhere else. I'll probably never know, so no skin off my nose, I suppose. Still, tough to believe a brick can make you a “permanent part” of anything. Maybe the Fanwalk remains at the doorstep of Jack Roosevelt Robinson's rotunda for the life of Citi Field, but Citi Field's life is probably as finite as everybody and everything else's.

Due to demographic trends, population movement and theological shifts, synagogues in the Northeast are merging in order to survive. Examining the reluctant coming together of 60-year-old Wantagh Jewish Center and 80-year-old Farmingdale Jewish Center as the brand new Farmingdale-Wantagh Jewish Center, Paul Vitello of the Times recently wrote:

What would become of the memorial plaques — those brass plates inscribed with the names of deceased congregants — attached to the walls and pews of the synagogues left behind?

When those plaques were installed, they were presumably up for the long haul. Who knew the long haul would carry an expiration date?

I don't mean to be sadly fatalistic about it. If all you do is focus on the pointlessness of everything, then you're on the road to total Nihilism (an extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence), which is only one short step above Glavinism (poor pitching that destroys all existence, combined with a rationalization that the results aren't devastating). But all I can think of with this Fanwalk thing, beyond the $5 convenience fee even, is an offer somebody will someday make to somebody else:

Authentic Citi Field Brick!

Makes A Great Gift!

*Thanks to the wonderfully vigilant Loge 13 for the link to 100 Greatest Days in New York Sports author Stuart Miller's op-ed piece in the Times suggesting Citi Field capacity be expanded to 49,000 considering that once luxury suites are accounted for, only 33,500 seats per Mets game will be available to the general public as plans now stand.

Congratulations and best of luck to the team with Tony Clark and the team with Kaz Matsui as they face off tonight for the honor of championing professional baseball's most venerable league.

How did it come to this? How did it come to the Diamondbacks and the Rockies in the NLCS? The recently insolvent and the eternally obscure? Mountain Standard vs. Mountain Daylight?

Don't take this the wrong way. Those are the two National League teams that deserve to be where they are. They won more games than anybody else, they defeated who they had to, they played the best. And now they are the best.

The Arizona Diamondbacks. The Colorado Rockies. One of them will be in the 2007 World Series. One of them will fall a little short. Neither of them is the New York Mets.

That, based on late-season returns, is to their credit. But would have you seen this coming as recently as, I don't know, three weeks ago? Wasn't this supposed to be our year? And if it wasn't, wouldn't you have thought it would be somebody else's year? Once it wasn't us, maybe it didn't matter, but at no point during the championship season was I thinking “we gotta watch out for the Diamondbacks and Rockies.”

Maybe I should have. Or somebody should have. They proved it where it counted. The Mets have scattered to their televisions, not unlike the Phillies, the Braves, the Dodgers, the Padres, the Cubs, the Brewers and the Cardinals, all of whom seemed more likely to have been in this position at some point since Spring Training convened.

Amazing how the two teams left standing refused to play this game on paper.

I'm at a bit of a loss to discuss with any authority the relative chances of the Rockies or Diamondbacks to advance to a pennant since the last time I watched either of them with total urgency was July 4. The Mets were done with both of them early this year, or should I say, they were each done with the Mets a long time ago. For the record, the Mets took four of seven from Arizona while Colorado beat the Mets four of six times. If a trend emerged from any of those series, it was that the Mets got worse the later it got.

Mets lost three of their final four versus the D'Backs, including two of three at Shea to begin June. You might remember June was the month when it all began to go to hell. Thank your Western Division champions for pushing us downhill.

Mets lost the last four they played against the Rockies, starting the day after the deceptively uplifting Endy drag bunt walkoff. The final three were astoundingly horrific beatdowns at Coors Field that came after the Mets had seemingly righted themselves versus Oakland, St. Louis and Philadelphia. Thank your Wild Card winners for sending us a message. Not their fault we didn't know what to do with it.

What I remember most of all about losing to the Diamondbacks and Rockies was how wrong it felt. It wasn't disappointing. It was unbecoming. We're the Mets! We're supposed to beat teams we hardly ever see and you hardly ever hear about! Enough of these nuisances! When do playoff tickets go on sale?

The sense of entitlement thing really doesn't work for us, does it?

My enthusiasm for the postseason usually runs in inverse proportion to our proximity to it. If we never had much of a chance (like when we were the team with Tony Clark and Kaz Matusi, albeit not quite simultaneously), then October is a delightful autumnal rebirth of baseball. If we were bounced from them or near them, I need at least one round to adjust. I watched little to almost none of the 1988, 1999 and 2006 World Series because I couldn't stand to look at what was supposed to our World Series. The divisional series last week were like that. I had no doubt we didn't deserve to go, but watching a ton of NLDS action that we were supposed to be in the thick of anyway — my Game Five tix are still atop a pile of stuff on my dresser (talk about “if necessary”) — was too much to bear. I checked in with the Diamondbacks and Cubs and the Rockies and Phillies only long enough to know what was going on.

The Mets seem a million miles away from this postseason now. They are happily irrelevant to what remains of our beloved sport in 2007. The fall festival is in full swing and I am ready to join it in progress, Chip Caray be damned. I have no overriding rooting interest in this one. I'll just be glad that National League baseball will be played and played with verve and vitality.

Note: On the off chance you're awaiting the rest of the 2007 retrospective promised on Monday, it should be up next week. Apologies for my lethargy, but it's not like last year is going anywhere soon.

Since the Mets' 2007 season went off the cliff, there's been no shortage of plans to get the Mets back on track, from trading Jose Reyes for Johan Santana to doing more or less nothing. A Met blueprint is a Rorschach test both of how angry you were at the 2007 club as it imploded and where you stand on the question of quantifiable vs. qualifiable and stats vs. intangibles.

Of course, the 2007 Mets themselves were a Rorschach test for this endless debate. You can read their Pythagorean record of 86-76 and conclude that they simply weren't that good, that they actually slightly outperformed their record and the rest is just noise. Or you can look at that now-infamous seven up with 17 to play, a team that statistics said would win the division 499 times out of 500, and conclude that a lack of character (whether in the clubhouse, the manager's office or both) had to be the difference — particularly when the veterans themselves were saying the team was complacent.

I like to fancy myself a stats guy, but I don't have the math chops for it — and this September has pushed me back into the camp that talks of intangibles and chemistry. When players collapse as horridly as the Mets did in those final two weeks, making ungodly errors and losing their composure and irking opponents at the wrong time, you can't tell me there isn't more going on than statistical snake-eyes. If intangibles mean anything to the sport, September 2007 was proof of it.

I'm still disgusted with the 2007 club — the sight of the clubhouse guy in the Kenny Lofton DHL ad pisses me off. That said, I'm glad the Mets decided against some spasm of vengeance. Willie Randolph should have kept his job, and did. And when you put 20-20 hindsight aside and look at a lot of Omar Minaya's 2007 moves in context, you see a fair amount of bad luck but not a lot of what any fair-minded person would call negligence or stupidity. Alex Nelson at MetsGeek did a bang-up job with such a review last week. It's worth reading, and I concur: I wasn't exactly upset when hefty arsonist Heath Bell was sent packing, thought the trade of tightrope-walking soft-tosser Brian Bannister for live-armed Ambiorix Burgos made sense, and didn't mourn trading two late-to-develop Double-A guys in Matt Lindstrom and Henry Owens for Jason Vargas, a promising starter with two plus pitches who'd shown some success in the big leagues. The moves that proved least-defensible were multiyear deals for Scott Schoeneweis and Guillermo Mota, but even here, it's easy to lose perspective: The Orioles gave Chad Bradford an insane three years and $10.5 million, a deal as certain to blow up on them as the sun will rise, and every middle reliever still on the market sang hosannas.

Did Willie handle the staff badly down the stretch? Hard to argue he didn't. Mota kept pitching, Schoeneweis and Sosa were used too much and Feliciano too little, and Philip Humber was left rotting on the bench while the deservedly anonymous Brian Lawrence took the hill. Still, plenty of comparatively reliable relievers had blow-ups down the stretch, too — it's not like any of us had much faith in anybody in September. And it's somewhat odd to think that players need a few years to develop and learn but managers can navigate every nuance of the interaction between strategy and personalities from the get-go. For a guy entering his fourth year as a manager, it strikes me that the key issue shouldn't be what Willie did wrong but whether he'll learn from it.

So, my vague blueprint. I apologize in advance that it's less a coherent plan than a series of bitter observations and diatribes. It goes without saying that I'd rather be considering how the Mets match up against the Diamondbacks.

First, some principles:

1. No More Half-Seasons: Why on earth does anybody think bringing back Moises Alou is a good idea? The Mets were 47-40 with him. Fantastic! But that means 75 times they were stuck figuring out who was going to play left field. I'd like to know how Moises being a year older improves on that scenario. It's hard enough mixing and matching veterans and kids and role players to make a World Series club; it's a lot harder when too many of those veterans are going to miss too much time during the season. Jose Valentin, El Duque, Carlos Delgado, Shawn Green — all aging players who missed significant time with a variety of ailments. One reason the 2007 Mets had trouble gelling? They were hardly ever on the field at the same time.

2. I Believe the Children Are the Future: And, y'know, we've got to, like, give them a sense of pride. There's such a thing as too much faith in intangibles. Lastings Milledge is a brat, but he's a better player than Shawn Green in every respect except deportment. Carlos Gomez and Ruben Gotay may be a bit raw, but one can imagine them as productive big-league players in 2010, when Moises Alou and Luis Castillo will be playing golf. You can roll the dice on aging, brittle veterans not falling off and/or getting hurt, or try to develop players who have potential. Because baseball is so insanely conservative, teams get stuck doing the former when they ought to do the latter: The Yankees saved their season almost by mistake, as injury after injury forced them to rely on youth, and youth turned out to be a good bet. Even then, they got Pleistocene when it mattered: With the season on the line, they gave the ball to a 45-year-old Satanic mercenary with a bad hamstring, watched him pitch like a 45-year-old with a bad hamstring, and only lived for another day because a 21-year-old and a 22-year-old rescued them. They got beat by a young Indians team anyway, as their scouts were preparing dossiers on two young teams in the Rockies and Diamondbacks.

3. The Myth of the Incentive Deal: Of all the fancies of WFAN callers, this one is my favorite — the idea that Player X should take a one-year deal with lots of incentives. Paul Lo Duca is 35 years old and has spent nearly two decades squatting behind the plate listening to his knees pop and taking foul balls off his thighs, shoulders and thumb. He should take a one-year deal because fans in New York City are vaguely mad at him? Luis Castillo is a 32-year-old with bad knees and 11 big-league seasons on his resume. Players like Lo Duca and Castillo are looking for that last three-year deal, not some one-year flier. In their shoes, you'd do the same.

4. Eat Your Mistakes: One of the principal benefits of being an obscenely rich club? It's being able to shrug off a bad $6 million here and a hard-luck $8 million there. A regrettable two-year deal for a middle reliever can kill the Kansas City Royals' hopes, and that sucks — but it's not our job to right that wrong. Guillermo Mota is owed $3.2 million in 2008, and a blind Irish setter could tell you that he has no business being near a pitcher's mound any longer. For God's sake, eat that contract.

And now, some prescriptions for individual players….

Not Even a Question: Shawn Green, Jose Valentin, Aaron Sele. They have no future here.

Only a Question If You Weren't Watching: Tom Glavine. Glavine torched the Mets' season in less than an inning on the mound, but it was his postgame comments that destroyed his future with the club. Sitting amid the wreckage of the season, the Manchurian Brave uttered his usual alibis about balls finding holes (two he threw found Dontrelle Willis with the bases loaded and a phantom fielder playing 20 feet behind David Wright) and then lectured us on the difference between “devastated” and “disappointed.” Anybody who'd want Tom Glavine back probably also thinks it would have been a good idea to have Kenny Rogers start the home opener in 2000.

Thanks for Services Rendered: Moises Alou, Luis Castillo, Paul Lo Duca. I like all three of these players, and their only sins are age and questions about their ability to stay on the field. But at this pass, those are sins enough.

Let's Pretend We Didn't: Guillermo Mota. Summoning the Pink Slip Fairy for Mota is a helluva way to spend $3.2 million. But have you seen what this man does to games?

Stuck With You, Part I: Orlando Hernandez. El Duque is owed $6.5 million. He's a legend, and his annual vacations used to be kind of cute. They aren't cute anymore, and as a starter he's blocking the likes of Mike Pelfrey, Philip Humber and Jason Vargas, about whom more needs to be known. El Duque as a middle reliever or a long man is an intriguing idea, but I'd bet El Duque is the least-intrigued guy in the room when that particular conversation comes up.

Stuck With You, Part II: Scott Schoeneweis. He's signed through 2009. It's hard to see him going anywhere unless he turns into Mota. (And hey, he's already been named in steroids reports.) This leaves us stuck hoping that since he's been good in the past, he might be good in the future. With middle relievers who aren't named Guillermo, that's not entirely insane. Particularly if he's used properly.

Stuck With You, Part III: Carlos Delgado. He's owed a jaw-dropping $16 million in 2008. He's a horrible first baseman, his value as a hitter has dropped to near replacement level, and his leadership disappeared in 2007. Yes, he said the right things about focus and lessons learned after Game 162, but before that the only times I remember him registering as a clubhouse voice were a) the farcical day when Lo Duca was supposedly a racist; and b) when he admitted the Mets got bored. Since his contract is immovable, at least I have my scapegoat for 2008.

Time to Step Up: Jose Reyes, Lastings Milledge, Willie Randolph. Jose came down with a bad slump and a chronic case of the stupids, but you don't exile a young player for being a young player — particularly not when he's the most electric player in the game. There's a fine line between enthusiastic and bush, and you'll consistently find Milledge just on the wrong side of it — his antics on the second-to-last day of the season woke up a Marlins club that should have been left to slumber. But I stubbornly believe Milledge will be worth the wait. In both cases, adult supervision is needed, and will be rewarded. Not coincidentally, more adult supervision has to be on Willie Randolph's to-do list. I've been won over by his calm demeanor and the patience with which he brought along the likes of Reyes and Wright, but now he's got work to do. I hope 2007 showed him the dangers of being too calm — it would be a wonderful world if every veteran played with Willie's passion and poise, but some of them need the whip hand now and again.

Bring 'Em Back: Jorge Sosa, Ramon Castro, Damion Easley. Sosa showed enough to deserve further consideration as a starter or setup guy. If Castro's back doesn't betray him, he should be the starting catcher. I think Easley would be a good bench guy. Update: And Marlon Anderson, who never should have left in the first place.

Stick With 'Em: Oliver Perez, John Maine, Joe Smith, Billy Wagner, Aaron Heilman. (None of these guys is a free agent.) They didn't have perfect seasons — Perez's final start was all kinds of ugly, Maine seemed to hit the wall a couple of times, Wagner and Heilman had avert-your-eyes weeks and Smith wound up exhausted. But they all either maintained a high level of performance or matured sufficiently in 2007 that you can hope for better things in 2008.

Blameless: Pedro Martinez, David Wright, Carlos Beltran.

So where do we go from here?

The Mets need a Goldilocks offseason — one that's not too hot, not too cold but just right.

Too hot is a danger. The Mets are no longer a cheapskate outfit scorned by run-of-the-mill free-agent catchers — they now spend money like the big-market colossus they are, and they're about to have a lot more of it. The final game witnessed by ownership might well have been the darkest moment in the franchise's history, and they're going to be sorely tempted to do something big to try and make us forget about that. But how big is wise? I can't see the Mets acquiring Johan Santana without taking an ax to the core of the team, and I shudder to think of Jose Reyes in a Twins uniform, to cite one hot rumor. No offense to Santana, but we would regret that one forever. Reyes is the engine of the team and the darling of the fanbase. Yes, I was mad at him in September — but I want to summon Joshua home from college to see a graying Reyes wave farewell and No. 7 go up on the CitiField wall. He's ours — don't you dare touch him.

There's another brand of “too hot” that I admit I can't get out of my head: A-Rod is about to be seeking $300 million over 10 years. Yes, he's emotionally needy and socially maladroit, but he also just put up 54 home runs and 156 RBIs playing in a cauldron. And tell me the Mets wouldn't enjoy that back-page knife to the Yankees' heart, as well as the chance for everybody to say bad things about Steve Phillips. Besides, starting in 2009 Citibank would pay two-thirds of the freight. It's tempting, isn't it? Sure, something about it makes the head throb, and there's the small matter of him not having a position. (A-Rod to third, Wright to first, Delgado becomes a $16 million bench player? Um, no.) Still, 54 home runs and 156 RBIs, no Jeter to treat him like Martha Dumptruck, and he'd be playing for the team he loved as a child.

More realistic would be to try and pry Dontrelle Willis loose from Florida — he had a lousy year, but he'll be 26 on Opening Day, he's left-handed and he speaks his mind in that clubhouse. I'm not going to say Rick Peterson could fix him in 15 minutes, but I bet 15 weeks could do it.

Then, of course, there's too cold. Don't like A-Rod? Think Dontrelle's done? Too in love with Heilman and Milledge to imagine them on another team? Just think how you'll feel in February, reading the same interchangeable stories about how new Met Livan Hernandez is in the best shape of his career and Moises Alou has been doing flexibility drills — and suspecting that none of it will make a damn bit of difference.

Two people who deserve a smoldering afterlife:

This clown who works for the Daily News. No, not Filip Bondy, but a copy editor who last week not only said he was giving up on being a Mets fan but would be switching over to another local team because they're such winners. Wonder who his new team is today.

And this clown who writes Op-Ed sports pieces for the Times every few months swearing off or allegiance to the Yankees based on how they're doing. In May, when they struggled, she said she was through with them. Later, when they were doing well, she said she was back in love with them. As of Sunday, they were all right with her. One assumes she's fallen hard for the Cowboys since last night. (I particularly like that she had to be informed by a Royals fan that you root for your team, win or, heaven forefend, lose.)

Adam Sommers and Jane Heller…this year's Worst Persons in the World!