“This is the train to…LONG BEACH. The next stop is…LONG BEACH.”

Ever since the Long Island Rail Road began employing automated voice systems, I'd never heard that kind of redundancy on an eastbound train. I'd never ridden to the final stop.

But there I was last night, on the 11:54 to Long Beach, my old hometown. Well, I thought as we pulled out of Island Park and I heard that computerized announcement, this figures.

We're coming to the end of the line.

And so it goes in these waning days of a baseball season and these desperate hours of this unwanted pennant race. The end of the line is nigh. Four games left. Almost no lead remaining.

Now don't it feel like you're a rider on a downbound train?

My car was parked in LB because I had made a southern excursion in the afternoon to meet Dana Brand, author of Mets Fan, a book for which I reiterate my previous recommendation. He was giving a little talk at the Long Beach Public Library and from there, he and I were going to Gino's for the world's best pizza and Shea for the world's worst baseball.

The company and the pizza were outstanding. The Mets were not.

This was the first of my four planned trips to the future home of the Citi Field parking lot this week. I wasn't banking on being there for the clinching. I thought the clinching would be taken care of already. Mostly I'd looked forward to the socializing. The social aspect of my Mets season has far outdistanced my Mets. I thought the last week of the year would be cause for the world's largest outdoor Diet Pepsi party. We'd drink, we'd nosh, we'd chat…Oh look! The Mets are tuning up for the playoffs!

Ta-ta to that notion.

Dana, like so many of those with whom I've shared a soft drink this season, was a better reason to go to a Mets game than the featured attraction. Shea itself is a better reason to go to Shea than the featured attraction. Even Future Shock Park Propaganda Plaza was pleasant in comparison to the Mets.

Curiosity drove us to the Citi Field Preview Center (which shouldn't be open this week, dammit) early enough to beat the crowds for the virtual tour of the luxury suites we'll likely never really sit in. It hardly matters when your season is crumpling up and blowing away, but boy was that thing scary. I used to work for a corporation that introduced initiatives in town hall meetings the way the Mets are previewing Citi Field. “You'll like it a lot. You don't have any questions. Now get back to your desks.” Seriously, I thought I'd have to file paperwork with the Mets to take the night off so I could go to the game.

• We voluntarily stood in a line reminiscent of the way happy earthlings voluntarily stood in a line for the spaceship that would take them to the home planet of their veritable saviors, the Kanamits, a race that had eliminated war and famine among humans. As every Twilight Zone aficionado knows, the Citi Field literature that is titled “To Serve Mets Fans” is actually a cookbook.

• We saw a meeting in progress in the conference room where a PowerPoint was up that trumpeted the improvement in the Mets' “on-field product” across 2006 and 2007. Must have been an old slide. I imagine a new deck will be in use by tonight, one that exclaims that the Mets scored 12 runs in the 5 innings that spanned the end of Tuesday and the beginning of Wednesday.

• We visited a replica of the Excelsior Club, which I think is where all the upstanding civic leaders in Stepford convened to plan their next move.

• We sat in all the different seats Citi Field has to offer. Some were more luxurious than others. It was no coincidence. The more you pay, the more padded the seat you will get. The least you pay, you get no padding. Every fan decidedly not a king.

• We were told that no inquiries about the “relocation process” for current season ticket holders could be answered at this time. I can think of a few European countries in the last century that trafficked in that kind of euphemism. I suppose it couldn't be addressed since the Mets are expending all their energy against the relocation process that is shifting them from the penthouse to the outhouse.

• We were not shown the time machine that would make it possible for us to adjust our career choices in order to earn what it will take to afford a seat at the Excelsior Club conference table.

I wouldn't make any presumptions about those Mets fans who joined us on the virtual tour, but I didn't sense a lot of Fortune 500 types were along for the ride. I have to wonder why the Mets sales department didn't tweak this dog-and-pony show for the common folk…something to whet our appetites beyond “your seat will not be padded.”

One thing that will be a vast upgrade over Shea Stadium when Citi Field opens in 2009 is it will not include the 2007 New York Mets.

My wife works with a woman whose first question and comment to her yesterday was, “How is your husband doing? He must be so upset with the way the Mets are playing.” Great — it's back: the autumnal rite of sending along Greg must be taking this very hard precautionary condolences; I received them with leaf-peeping regularity in my mid-to-late thirties. Thanks for asking, but I'm with Jason as regards the current Zeitgeist. Go ahead, dare me to be upset in the 1998 sense that this club has six-sevenths of its erstwhile margin stuck in its windpipe. 1998's five-loss choke job was brutal because we hadn't been to the playoffs in a decade. It hurt because we were being deprived of what we could only imagine.

Amid 2007's disquieting gaggery, the saving grace is the relatively recent 2006 memory that lingers lovelier as this year's days grow short. Never mind that it's a lot of the same guys. Never mind that '06 ended as it did. You never believed for half a second that those Mets were “complacent”. If their immediate successors are satisfied that winning a division once and a division series once confirms their talent and permits their complacence, then maybe it's fine for us, the fans, to dismiss this 2007 edition as a fraud and rest on laurels constructed of 2006 National League East Champions pennants and t-shirts. (If there are any left over, we can weave our own Citi seat padding.)

We're not entitled to a postseason per se, but I don't think we deserve to party like it's the year before 1999. We're not trotting Brian McRae and Tony Phillips out there. But how can you look at this relentlessly helpless outfit and see anything but a choke in progress? Philip Humber justified my conditional faith by appearing to know what he was doing for a couple of innings, as if he'd been pitching all his life. Then it became apparent he wasn't ready or he was too rusty or the Beltway Behemoths were just too massive a challenge at this tender stage of his development. I hope to see him again some day.

The same I cannot say for Joe Smith, at least not until he spends some quality time at Binghamton or somewhere. Imagine that your defending N.L. East champs' potential to repeat came down on the final Wednesday of 2007 to Philip Humber and Joe Smith, an untested rookie and a failed rookie. All that payroll, all that padding and no experience to rely on.

When we're paying whatever we're paying for whatever seating's available at Citi Field (suddenly the Mets don't loom as such a long-term hot ticket), I will be endorsing a new philosophy for management: Don't skimp on pitching. When Chad Bradford got the three-year deal from Baltimore, I thought of course you should let him go. How do you give a non-closer three years? They're all interchangeable and you can't commit that long to such an uncertain quantity.

Forget that. Give the next Bradford three years. Give the next Darren Oliver two years. It's chump change when you consider the stakes. If it doesn't work, then eat it. It's better than hoping a Joe Smith will be up to the task of retiring Major League batters (after everybody's taken his measure) at crucial junctures in his second professional season.

This is not a license to re-sign Guillermo Mota or give Scott Schoeneweis (who has improved enough of late to rate his own PowerPoint page) three years. But I'm done worrying about the Mets' budget. I've seen the future. I've seen the Excelsior Club. They can pay worthy* relievers any premium they demand.

While Dana and I chatted the early innings away, pausing just long enough to standing-ovate for Beltran and Alou, it was all good. This had sure-thinginess written all over it…Sodaman! Diet Pepsi all around! Then I happened to notice it was 6-2 and there were Nationals on base. Then 6-4 and more runners on base. Hey, we could lose this game. It was the strangest realization. Even after this endless, shapeless, nightmarish stretch of endless, shapeless, nightmarish ball when you're praying the hinges on the bullpen gate aren't oiled — it's real “The Lady, or the Tiger?” stuff behind that door right now — I thought a 5-0 lead was safe for a team that has so much talent that it sometimes gets bored with the work involved in preserving its leads. Then I thought a 6-2 lead was reasonably golden. Then I thought this is pretty much the worst I've ever seen my team perform when you factor in context.

Tipping point, set and match. Phillies cruised. Nationals crushed. Mets crumbled. The pen eventually resembled competent, just in time for the offense to take a batnap (until Wagner). And the lead is suffering from the kind of shrinkage normally associated with a frightened turtle.

Are the Mets “blowing” this or are they merely losing a lot of games while their closest opponent is winning many? If you don't have enough wins at the end of the year, did you “blow” it or did it just not add up for you? I don't want to dissect that line of thinking just yet. I don't want to come to the end of the line just yet. I don't want to have confront real life without baseball just yet.

*word added upon further consideration of subject matter

…if you want perspective, can-do, rah-rah, exhortations to stay the course, solidarity with our boys, or any of that shit. Because you're not going to get it. You're not going to get one little scrap of it.

This team sucks. And they don't suck in a wet-behind-the-ears way that makes you want to see what they'll turn into next year. They suck in a way that makes you want them to just go away. Which it certainly looks like they'll be doing at the end of the week.

And really, honestly, how can you care about this pathetic baseball team? Horrifying mental mistakes, stupefyingly dumb tantrums at umpires, ludicrous mismanagement of the bullpen and roster, listless play and innings and innings and innings of bad baseball — which part of this rancid stew makes you want to remember your boyhood heroes, or daydream about green fields and summer nights? And should the Mets somehow pull out of their death spiral, which part of it makes you want to fork over $75 a night to watch them sleepwalk through the first week of October against the Cubs or Padres?

This New York Observer article is full of dreadful admissions from Carlos Delgado, Pedro Martinez and Tom Glavine, all of whom said that yeah, the Mets play complacent ball. If you didn't read it already, go do so. You're back? Good. One of those articles that makes you want to look away for fear that your fandom is about to crumble, isn't it? Because how on earth can those players — potentially three Hall of Famers — let such a thing happen in their clubhouse? If it's not their job to stop it, whose is it? Willie Randolph? Dream on — apparently he's been a winner all his life, and winners don't dirty themselves by asking millionaires they're paid to oversee not to get bored with little details like making the postseason.

What's so infuriating is that the article makes clear something I'd suspected, but shied from confronting. Namely, that blowing a five-run lead to the Washington Nationals — the fucking Washington Nationals — is a symptom, not the disease.

“I think at times we can get a little careless. We’ve got so much talent I think sometimes we get bored.”

“We have so much talent that sometimes we relax a little bit and then we get ourselves in trouble.”

“Sometimes when you’re a team as talented as we are—I don’t know if I’d use the word ‘bored,’ but I guess you can get complacent sometimes. You don’t pay attention to details every now and then because you do have a ton of talent and think you can on most days do everything you wanna do.”

These are not things said by pissed-off bloggers fuming in their basements. These are things said in very recent history by decorated New York Met veterans, players universally known as leaders and good clubhouse guys. They are horrifying self-indictments that are about to turn into epitaphs.

And if they somehow don't? If the Mets somehow cheat the hangman, what then? Don't tell me about the 2005 Chicago White Sox and the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals, because I don't want to hear it. I want to hear why on earth I should give a fuck about the 2007 New York Mets. Because there's far too much evidence that the 2007 New York Mets themselves do not.

Gotta love the way spoilers are capable of playing in September. You can see they have no chance themselves, but they keep battling and keep driving the better teams crazy. Tuesday night the seemingly overmatched Mets proved they can play with anybody. Even though you watch them and you know you're looking at a team that's way out of contention, it makes you proud to see them driving so hard this late in the season, so late in a ballgame.

Sure, they couldn't pitch and made loads of mistakes and eventually came up short versus the Nationals, but the Nats, no matter how many runs they score off our Metsies, aren't going to take them lightly any time soon.

And who knows? If there were enough games left, I'd bet we'd have an excellent shot at clinching fourth place.

When you're eternally the underdog, you dream of taking down the favorite. One very thin strand of me is in that position right now, with my alma mater, the University of South Florida, ranked for the very first time ever in the Top 20 of the AP college football poll. This Friday night, they…oh hell, we, the No. 18 team in the country, play West Virginia, No. 5. West Virginia is one of those football schools you've heard of. Making the AP list is hardly cause for their alumni to feel honest-to-god goosebumps this week. The game's in Tampa, but the Bulls are 7-point underdogs. If they lose, it's expected. If they win, the commuter campus I knew as a hotbed of apathy from 1981 to 1985 will go more nuts than it already has for its still youthful program.

This is the kind of underdog vs. favorite matchup I understand intrinsically. Everything I learned and loved about sports from the time I was old enough to distinguish between sides has been wrapped up in pulling for the underdog. My team has overwhelmingly more often than not been the underdog. I just assumed it always would be.

That's definitely how I figured it would play out if the Mets and Phillies ever threw down over any stakes of significance. It's all about where you came in on the movie, I suppose, but when I first paid any real attention to the baseball team from Philadelphia, they were far more Apollo Creed than Rocky Balboa. They were the champs in our division. Except for technically, we weren't really in their division. We weren't in their weight class. We were the lightweight tomato can whose stuff Mickey had thrown out of our locker and onto skid row.

Phillie history is synonymous with futility, I'm sure you've heard. They sure were futile when I first came upon them in 1969, a horrendous fifth-place team that only the expansion Expos kept out of last. They changed stadiums, changed uniforms, changed personnel, but the only tangible change in their performance all that movement brought them in the early '70s was a change from fifth to sixth. They began, however, to rise noticeably in 1974, the same year the Mets had their first losing season since I'd begun watching them in '69. They finished third. We finished fifth.

It would signal a lifelong pattern: The Mets had been good, the Phillies had been bad; the Phillies were getting good, the Mets were getting worse. They'd flip and flop for the next three decades, barely touching on their respective ways up and down. Oh, sometimes they'd both suck simultaneously, but that's not of much use to anybody.

The Mets and Cubs had a great recurring rivalry that even flared up during a Wild Card race once the two had been separated as Easterners. The Mets and Cardinals competed closely as a matter of course for several seasons. The Mets and Pirates duked it out once or twice. The Mets would go on to do memorable battle with the Braves. As documented monthly in this space, the Mets actually spent a year in genuine pursuit of the Marlins.

But none of those teams played anywhere near the Mets. The Phillies did. Thus, the rub. Wouldn't it be great, I thought as the Phillies rode roughshod over the N.L. East in the late 1970s and the Mets made themselves comfortable in its basement, if these two geographically aligned franchises went at it? I mean really went at it? When I was in high school, everything was Red Sox-Yankees this, Yankees-Red Sox that. I could read a map. I knew Philadelphia was closer to New York than Boston was. I also knew that New York was a National League town on hiatus.

Wouldn't it be great if we had a real Mets-Phillies rivalry?

That was my thinking in the winter of 1978-79 (post-Bucky Dent, not coincidentally). I became mildly obsessed with the idea that someday the Mets would ride the escalator up the National League East, past the Expos and the Cubs and the Cardinals and the Pirates and at last be pounding on the Phillies' door. The Phillies of Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton and Bob Boone and Larry Bowa and Garry Maddox and Greg Luzinski and, somehow, Tug McGraw and, all of a sudden, Pete Rose…they were so smug after finishing first three years in a row, leaving us a combined 76 games from first place. But someday they'd be taken down by my Mets. My Mets of Mazzilli and Youngblood and Swan and Stearns and Flynn and Henderson and Skip Lockwood, a better closer any day than that lousy turncoat McGraw.

I really wanted a Mets-Phillies conflict to explode. And if it did, I truly believed we would prevail.

It didn't happen. It never came close to happening. I imagined it was happening at a crucial juncture of the 1980 season when the surprising Mets, in fourth place and on the fringes of the race that August, braced for a five-game series at Shea versus the big bad Phillies. Philadelphia wasn't in first at the time, but they would be any minute with a mighty assist from us. They stomped all over the Mets, taking five of five (40 to 12) and ending the whole Magic Is Back illusion in one cruel weekend's worth of flippin' cold reality check. Philly would win a World Series, their first, that October. The Mets would have their day a half-dozen years later, but by then the Phillies were a footnote to the proceedings. By 1986, I'd forgotten all about my fantasy feud. Nearby or not, the Phillies had ceased to matter where the Mets were concerned, even in my mind.

Reading George Vecsey the other day brought it all back. Here finally, he wrote, were the two potential pennant race pairings from the Great Northeast together at once: Yankees and Red Sox, as usual, and Mets and Phillies, first time ever. I suddenly remembered I had wanted this when I was 15, 16, 17 years old. I wanted this when I was looking up five spots in the standings to see the Phillies lording it over us. I wanted this when Mike Schmidt filmed a soft drink commercial in which he swatted home runs while a distraught generic catcher with blue and orange piping around his sleeve cuffs looked on in total dumbfoundery (while Schmitty was “Turning 7 Up,” we were finishing 24 out). I wanted this when we were the underdogs and they were the perennial favorites.

It never, ever occurred to me I would get it when we were on top and they would have to come after us. Once we became the kind of team that could be in first place in late September, I was never looking for any kind of rivalry.

Nevertheless, it came looking for us. By losing convincingly to Washington Monday night, we assured ourselves, after 46 seasons of doing no more than nodding and maybe exchanging some misdelivered mail, of our first no-holds-barred, all-the-marbles, down-to-the-wire pennant race with the Philadelphia Phillies. There will be no riding this thing out, no falling on the ball or taking one knee. When the margin is two games with six to play, you can talk all you want about destiny in your own hands and “just win, baby,” but there's no way you're not sweating the out-of-town scoreboard. The way we have pitched of late, we can't afford to be only Mets fans. Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday we are red-hot Braves fans because that's who plays the Phillies. There's a pretty good chance we'll be diehard Nats fans come Friday for the same reason.

The Phillies don't have Mike Schmidt anymore. There are nights when it feels like they have five or six of him and it scares me Schmidtless. On the other hand, we're not exactly a bunch of Mazzes and Hendus over here — though we could probably use Skip Lockwood right about now. We can win this thing. We can lose this thing. They can grab this thing if we're not careful. Even if we are, they might.

Approximately 110 miles from Shea Stadium to Citizens Bank Park. Six days from today to the end of the season. Two wins buffer us from them. We have to hang on to at least one of them.

Nope, definitely not the way I pictured it.

The final homestand is at hand. These seven games, starting tonight, will determine how many/if any games beyond them might be played in 2007. I have a suggestion designed to make the most of our final-week home field advantage.

Don't anger Shea.

It's been a matter of curiosity all season that a team with the best road record in all of baseball (47-34) has been only moderately successful at home. The rule is kick ass when you bat last and maintain when you're away. The Mets, being the Mets, have turned this directive on its head and made life just that much harder on themselves. Entering the series-opener with Washington, they're 40-34 at Shea Stadium, almost certainly guaranteeing they will have a better record on the road than at home.

There isn't another contender or quasi-contender in the National League that can say that. It just isn't done.

Why has this happened? Because the fans are inconsiderate of their favorite millionaires' feelings? Because the horde of media is that much more massive? Because the players are nagged by their significant others before leaving for work and are thus distracted? Because sometimes anomalies occur?

All mildly plausible explanations, I suppose. But I have my own.

Shea Stadium is pissed off. It's cranky. It's hurt. And it's taking it out on the Mets the only way it knows how — by not being home-field-advantageous to its home team.

For this homestand, Mets management needs to tone down the Citi Field promotion. No more DiamondVision plugs. No more Preview Center. No more “let's get it done!” You don't need to advertise the wonders of Citi Field this week. Citi Field is in plain sight. Its obvious and impressive progress is its best advertisement.

By hyping it as much as you're doing right now, you're hurting Shea's feelings at the worst time possible.

Bad move. This is no time to tell our comrade-in-arms, our best ally, our oldest friend that we can't wait to place him on the curb for recycling. We need him. We need him desperately.

Should we manage a victory tonight, we are somehow tied with Arizona for best record in the N.L. It's almost slipped my mind, but we can still be the 1-seed and have HFA throughout the LDS and LCS should we make it that far. It didn't help us in Game Seven last year and our record would not indicate it's an asset this year, but those factors notwithstanding, wouldn't you rather more games be played at Shea than somewhere else?

I don't know how Shea is doing it, but Shea may be conspiring against us. Why should he display loyalty to us if management is not loyal to him? Why should he care about going out in a blaze of glory if he is reminded not so subtly that, like the merchandise in the chop shops across 126th St., he will soon be stripped down and sold for parts?

I'm also guessing Shea's sensibilities are offended by the desperation the organization shows in its unseemly appeals for enthusiasm. Shea remembers when “MAKE SOME NOISE!” was an Astrodome conceit. That much Shea has probably gotten used to and sucked up, but what's with this steady drumbeat of celebrity nonsense on DiamondVision? Kevin James may be bona fide, but he's wearing a cap promoting a move that's already out of theaters and he's got the cadence all wrong. He's sacrificing the good of “LET'S GO METS!” for a cheap laugh. Chris Rock has wavered back and forth between New York teams his whole life. He looks uncomfortable leading our cheers. Robin Williams has no connection to the Mets save for a Comic Relief appearance in the booth seventeen years ago. Adam Sandler is a Yankees fan, for crissake.

This is like the sainted “Let's Go Mets!” video being tainted by appearances from Scott Shannon and Mark McEwen and J.J. Kennedy, disc jockeys whose only interest in the Mets was the publicity it could lend their careers. Shea can smell such desperation. He's downwind from the Iron Triangle. He's smelled everything. The only non-baseball celebrities Shea needs to hear from on DiamondVision are the late Curly Howard and Peter Finch. The rest of us can handle LET'S GO METS! are on our own.

I tuned in early to the Phillies-Nationals game yesterday specifically to watch the farewell ceremonies to RFK. I don't know what I was expecting, but even with no expectations it was underwhelming. They rounded up seven 1960s Senators to trot out with current Nats to their positions. They couldn't find nine. Except for Frank Howard and Dick Bosman, the identities of most of them strained even my trivial impulses, though this was obviously an internal matter among Washingtonians. Still, they were remembering a blatantly unsuccessful franchise that played there a grand total of ten years more than 35 years ago while the current franchise has been in residence all of three years sans pennant. Plus RFK is a pretty beat facility, to be kind.

But ya know what? I was moved. They were saying goodbye to a ballpark and it was sweet. I'm always watching out for the soul of a stadium and RFK got, at the very least, a classy acknowledgement of its existence. It will continue to exist for non-baseball purposes. It was never intended as more than a refugee encampment for the Nationals anyway.

One year and four days from now, September 28, 2008, it will be our turn. No doubt the memory machine is already cranking behind the scenes and I'm confident the Mets will do a worthy job when the moment of departure arrives. But this week, fraught with postseason implications, is special beyond the standings. This is the last homestand of the second-to-last season of Shea, in essence the final “regular” or “normal” final homestand of a season we'll ever have here, the last time we'll leave it with the certainty that we'll come back to it next spring. Let us proceed with dignity this week. Given the stakes, let us cheer our team on toward better things and let us remind Shea Stadium that it is still the family homestead.

Ballparks, I'm convinced, have feelings, too.

Al Michaels: And it all comes down to just one man.

Public Address Announcer: Now shooting, No. 23, Squeak “Little Bitch” Scolari.

The above dialogue from the funniest and most misunderstood sports movie ever, BASEketball, came to mind Sunday afternoon as the bottom of the eleventh was about to begin. Gary Cohen set the scene by unintentionally channeling Bob Costas. Paraphrasing here:

It's 7-6, Mets, and look who's coming on to try to save it — Aaron Sele!

He may as well have called him Squeak.

We'll skip the other names Mets fans must have been formulating for their relievers so as to maintain the thin veneer of being a family blog, but Cohen's intonation was, essentially, you're not going to believe this, but Willie Randolph thinks he's going to escape this impending disaster with a washed-up starter turned discredited long reliever, someone he's used all of three times in September, someone he avoided calling on in a dire situation three nights earlier despite his having warmed up that very inning and someone who pitches almost exclusively when the Mets are far ahead or, as is more often the case, far behind.

If Gary didn't say that, that's clearly what he (and we) had in mind. Entering Sunday, Aaron Sele had made 32 appearances as a Met and the Mets were 9-23 when he pitched. So you don't think it was all a coincidence, Aaron Sele held a 5.29 ERA for 2007 from the beginning of the season to September 17 — six games earlier, which was the last time Randolph saw fit to use him. It's been a year plainly worthy of Kenny “Squeak” Scolari, BASEketball's resident luckless nebbish.

Except that after running through six relievers in five innings, Willie was down to his whaddayagonnado? corps, and Sele was the best of that lot. For the first time, in the 155th game of the season, Aaron Sele did what he had to do. Let the scorebook show…

One pitch to Hanley Ramirez: 6-3.

Two pitches to Dan Uggla: 8 (though not without a little Endy effort).

Either not knowing a good thing when he had it goin' on or deciding not to press his luck, Willie went to his ninth pitcher of the day, lefty Scott Schoeneweis, to go after a lefty batter, Jeremy Hermida. Schoeneweis, whose situational Squeakness has been largely ignored in the wake of Guillermo Mota's total Squeakness, needed but two pitches to induce a grounder to first.

The save was Schoeneweis'. The holiest of holds was Sele's. The sigh of relief from one end of Metsopotamia to another was audible.

Three wins in a row for the worst first-place team we've ever rooted for, the worst first-place team to maintain its lofty position for 131 days and counting, the worst first-place team to pick up ground on the scariest second-place team any fan base has ever felt breathe hotly down its collective neck from no closer than 1-1/2…now 2-1/2 back.

Baseball is cyclical in so many ways, as a freaky omen of sorts reminded me. Late Saturday night I listened to the Rockies beat the Padres on XM. When it was over, I was turning the dial back to Home Plate, their baseball news channel, planning to shut off the satellite radio altogether. Except I heard Gary Cohen's voice. It was one of their MLB Classics, from October 1, 2000, the final game of that season. It was a thirteen-inning affair between the Mets and the Expos, though other than the length and the Mets winning on an errant throw, there was nothing particularly classic about what was otherwise a tuneup for the coming playoffs. Nevertheless, I was at that game (with Jason and Emily), so I took a special interest in listening to it seven years later.

When I picked up the rebroadcast, the Mets were going down in the sixth to a middle reliever named Guillermo Mota. And when Gary and Bob (a chill in itself hearing him) were running down the out-of-town scoreboard, the probables for the important Seattle-Anaheim game not yet started were Aaron Sele for the Mariners and Scott Schoeneweis for the Angels.

The record compels me to report first-year manager Mike Sciosica opted for righty Mark Petkovsek instead of Schoeneweis (and lost), but still…hearing those three names on a Mets broadcast from a whole other era, none of them of more than the most passing interest at the time…it rated a “wow!” in the wee hours of Sunday morning for sure.

Keeping with the baseball-is-cyclical theme, is it possible the cycle of losing that was going to break us has passed with us having lost only one game off our ragingly adequate lead in a week's time? It doesn't feel like a three-game winning streak, but once more, truthiness doesn't matter here. The legitimate truth is the Mets found a way to win on Friday and Saturday and, at last, Sunday — despite no help from the relatively dependable Feliciano, Heilman (who jiggled his right shoulder after every pitch like something's terribly wrong with him) and Wagner (spasm-free but rusty) but because of loads of help from the generally dismissed and/or despised Sosa, Mota, Smith, Sele and Schoeneweis.

We ain't too proud to beg. We begged the Nationals to not roll over against the Phillies, and they didn't…even though we are hours from begging them to lay down like dogs at Shea for three straight nights. And we ain't too proud to accept a St. Bernard's keg of bourbon, first aid and outs from the Treacherous Three no matter how many times we've cursed out mutts like Mota, Schoeneweis and Sele. It's late September. Everybody who can contribute meaningfully is welcomed back into the family with open arms.

It's not much of a formula for winning to have John Maine strike out nine, leave at the first sign of stress in the sixth and then shuttle arms in and out like Ollie North dealing with the Iranians and the Contras, but if it works, it works. It's not ideal to have Carlos Beltran smack a knee into a wall in the midst of his second game-saving catch in three days, but you gotta hope he rubs some dirt on it and is rarin' to go sooner than later. It's not inspiring to hear the undisputed Hit Streak King tell Kevin Burkhardt that playing every day has him gassed and looking for Red Bull, but Moises, baby, you had the shank of summer to not play. All hands on deck.

Here's a worry I'm ready to release into the atmosphere because it seems valid despite no current trend in its favor: we're gonna stop hitting any minute now because it's exactly what the Mets do. They've been able to afford to indulge in deadly round after round of bullpen roulette because the offense has clicked to record-breaking proportions. The Mets have scored at least seven for six straight days. They've never done that before. Who here thinks they'll keep that up? There was a similar stint in August (also when we were playing mostly second-division clubs) that we lit up the runs column. Then we stopped. You know the relief pitching will tighten up the second Alou's streak stops, the moment Paulie remembers his hand hurts, the very night neither of the key Carloses can any longer swing, when even David isn't of all that much Value. And then we'll be off on another thrilling baseball adventure.

Just a horrible hunch. Hope I'm wrong. I find it better to articulate my darkest fears and then root like hell that I look silly in retrospect than keep it all bottled up. Better for me to feel silly than Sele to be Squeak…so to speak.