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

Bob Costas: Unfortunately, that one man is Squeak Scolari.

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.

The scoreboard presented a fact all through Saturday's game: the Mets were beating the Marlins. But my considerable gut told me different: the Mets are in trouble.

This is what this season and this September have come down to — feeling the game instead of following it. Even though the Mets led and were never in anything remotely resembling trouble against the Marlins, I never watched or listened calmly, not for a single batter, not until the 27th Marlin out was recorded.

The truth is the Mets won easily; that's a fact. The truthiness of the matter — and isn't that what Stephen Colbert has been teaching us to feel for two years? — is nothing feels easy anymore.

That a problem? Only in that it reflects the state of the Mets heading into their final eight days of the regular season, hopefully not their final eight days of 2007 baseball altogether.

Devoid of context, Saturday gave us a glorious game, featuring the strikeout stylings of Oliver Perez, a power burst by the almost but never quite forgotten Ramon Castro and some fairly Valuable David Wright action. Moises Alou continues to set the Mets' hitting streak record and the Mets have something that is technically a winning streak.

In context…phew!

All I could do, for the most part, was count down from 27 to 1 and cross every digit that flexes that Ollie was up to a complete game or the modern-day equivalent: an eight-inning masterpiece. It's both the truth and the truthiness that says relying on the Mets' bullpen to not lose a Mets' win is very, very dangerous these days.

Total props to the Damned Duo of Guillermo Mota and Scott Schoeneweis from Friday night for bailing their team out after a lengthy rain delay (and after Pedro Martinez bailed himself out with those frozen-custard strikeouts of Cody Ross and Miguel Olivo). They reversed a biblical flood of bad fortune, no doubt about it. But do you expect anybody in this pen — those two in particular — to replicate such competence on consecutive days? That's why I was rooting for Randolph and Peterson to forget this is 2007 and pretend it was 1968 when it was still legal to send a starter out to begin the ninth.

Failing that, the best we could hope for in these Wagnerless times was Heilman, a five-run lead and a lousy three outs. The most frightening image of this game was the recurring shot of the Mets' bullpen: all those sorry pitchers lingering on directors' chairs set up down the third base line; it looked like a casting call for the gates of hell. Heilman struggled to throw 24 pitches but escaped the fire down below. It was only the five-run lead that made me confident he wouldn't do us in. And I consider myself a solid supporter of Aaron Heilman.

Tim McCarver (who is a back spasm to listen to when not leavened by the genial grace notes of Ralph Kiner) did echo a point that had been hatching in my head these past couple of days, that this is not the way you want to go into a postseason. Just get to the postseason, of course, and then we'll quibble, but boy…what a mess in terms of health this roster is. Beltran was out there despite the bruise to the knee he took Friday. Delgado rushed back at probably well less than 100 percent. Lo Duca's been hanging in there with a battered hand. Green was hit today. You can hear Castillo's knees barking through the television. Alou is always one stiff breeze from dismemberment. If you can't admire this team for the way it's been playing, at least admire that many of them are playing at all.

They are on the field, they are trying and, for two straight days, they are succeeding. It should feel good. Most I still feel anxiety. It's so different from early in the season when the Mets would be trailing by some disturbing margin and I'd think, “all we gotta do is get a coupla guys on.” These days I look at a five-run lead over a last-place team and wonder how we can possibly avoid blowing it. The truthiness — the feeling surrounding this club — is still quite shaky.

Good thing the standings reflect only the truth.

It's been a long time since I had no idea what the New York Mets were up to. Sure, there's been a game here and a game there that saw me nod off in the middle innings or when it was the 12th with no end in sight, games that left me to wake up the next morning wondering what happened. But that was easy enough to repair — just pad on over to the other room and pull up My Yahoo.

This is different. I'm in a Mets-free world. We're coming to the end of three days in Milan, and staying in a hotel on the outskirts of town, in what is basically a forlorn office park. The hotel itself is more like a slightly upscale hostel. It has Internet access, but getting it is mind-boggling: Scratch off a card, enter an ID, put your cellphone number in the Web form, get an SMS message on your phone, enter that as your password. This, I suppose, is the Italian urge to make straightforward things extremely complicated. I mean, really. Why not have the password delivered by carrier pigeon, or materialize in the entrails of a spring lamb? My cellphone is currently a borrowed one with a SIM card bought in London. My phone number? That remains somewhat theoretical. I managed to send Emily text messages, but neither her replies nor that password ever showed up in return. Some combination of the UK code minus the London prefix plus or minus a zero would do the trick, but only if you are much smarter than I am. I fussed with the card for a while, fussed with the front desk, and then gave up. (Besides, not to be disloyal, but staying up until 4 a.m. was kind of messing with my ability to be a decent employee, which is why I'm over here.) No Net. No Mets.

Yesterday morning the colleagues with Blackberrys (which between the nervous editors and IT guys would be everybody else) gave me the crushing news of Miami Part 1. This morning, though, is our free day. No info. So I went to Venice.

I didn't have to go that far — they have Internet cafes in Milan. But I wasn't inclined to spend my free day in Milan, which has some nice things but is fairly unlovely overall — there's the Duomo and a lot of buildings that have that important, stolid Federal Reserve look, but otherwise it's a gritty, working town rather than a tourist spot. There was Lake Como, where I could hobnob with George Clooney and act out stilted dialogue from Attack of the Clones, but tomorrow we'll be in Lausanne, which I'm told looks somewhat similar. Venice was three hours away by train — far, but I've spent 38 years on Earth without ever seeing it, so who can guarantee I'll get another chance? And there's the whole global-warming thing.

I'm happy I got up and navigated the train system with the minimum competence required. Because Venice is soooo worth it. Every street is interesting. I've been here about three hours, and you do not get tired of walking over bridges or darting down little calles or just looking at colorful houses next to canals and wondering what it would be like to live there.

But until I got to this Net cafe, Venice brought me no closer to the Mets. Instead, I was left fussing and worrying and trying to extract portents from random sightings: There's a cat sitting on that railing above the canal! Right in my view from lunch! I like cats! Greg Prince loves cats! The Mets must have won!

And hey, they did. On the other hand, if the cat had plunged into the canal, I suppose I could have just written off October. And maybe followed my furry messenger to the bottom of the Adriatic.

Doesn't it seem like the Mets have been playing one endless game since Monday, with the score Opponents 39 Mets 36, heading to the top of the 47th? They've been in a mostly empty stadium that isn't Shea; the fans are mostly Mets fans; they score early but it doesn't seem to matter; they give up runs, they give back runs, they have runs tacked on to them; they are thrown out, they fall down, they are carried off; we endure total and complete apoplexy…yet because the other team isn't much good either, somehow they sometimes win.

Oh — and sometimes it rains.

As familiar as one game atop another on this numbing road trip has felt, however, sometimes you see something you've never seen before.

***

These are the strangest of possible words:

“Martinez to Mota to Schoeneweis.”

Trio of Met arms, two for the birds,

Martinez and Mota and Schoeneweis

A starter whose rehab's complete

Two pen men we urge take a seat

Friday night in Miami they accomplished their feat

“Martinez to Mota to Schoeneweis.”

***

And sometimes you see something else you've never seen before.

***

Twenty-three was iconic

Like Junior Griffey's nerve tonic

No Met had ever managed to hit in more

Cleon started the tale

He'd share it with Mike Vail

They established a streak

That others would seek

To break but fail

Until Huuuuu-bee!

Went twenty-four consecutive

Until Huuuuu-bee!

Went to the plate and was selec-u-tive

Hubie Brooks set the hit streak mark

Occasionally would hit 'em from the park

Our man Huuuuu-bee!

He hit in twenty-four…

Along came Piazza

Stronger than a matzoh

There wasn't much this catcher couldn't do

Batting was his forté

Like hearing Hendrix play

While swinging for fences

He upset defenses

Ev-e-ry day

Mike Piaaahhh-zza!

Went twenty-four consecutive

Mike Piaaahhh-zza!

Became the record's co-executive

Mike Piazza tied the hit streak mark

Occasionally would hit 'em from the park

Along with Huuuuu-bee!

He hit in twenty-four…

Now there's a big old asterisk

By the name we all know as David Wright

Dave streaked across two seasons

But for fairly plain reasons

A two-year streak simply doesn't count

It's not the Wright amount

Moises Alou is

Not some Johnny Lewis

Or any random garden-variety Met

He healed his aching quad

Drained base hits from his bod'

At forty-one

He's having fun

Where no Met's trod

Moises Ahhhhh-loo!

Went twenty-five consecutive

Moises Ahhhhh-loo!

Has issued a direc-u-tive:

“Brooks and Piazza…they were fine;

But the Met hit streak mark you see is mine”

Moises Alou

Has hit in twenty-five

(Straight games!

Straight games!

Moises Ahhhhh-loo!

Has hit in twenty-five

Straight games!

Straight games!

Alou's the guy…

Who hardens his hands…

Oh gross!

Hit more!

Hit more!)

Sincere regards to the inspirational figures of Franklin P. Adams and Terry Cashman, parodied with affection in this space, I assure them.

I realized something maybe a half-hour ago. I can live without these Mets making the playoffs. But I can't (or, more accurately, desperately don't want to) live with these Mets missing the playoffs. Do you understand the delineation? Not winning is fine. They not-win plenty. But to become synonymous with this sort of finish, to become “the 2007 Mets” for all time, to become the universal reference point for every late-season slide/choke…no, I can't stand for that. I just can't.

So c'mon Pedro! You've pitched several significant games as a Met, but you've never been asked to pitch a must-win game for us. This is must-must-MUST-win, tonight. For all the magic we like to ascribe to you and for all the vibes we like to derive from you, it comes down to pitching like Pedro Martinez. Like you have three times this month. Like you did so long and so well so that this organization had to sign you for its own good.

You I Gotta Believe in. Save us from ourselves, would you?

Just watch the clubhouse floor there. I hear it can get slippery.