I wouldn't call that one a classic — too much bit-spitting in situations where the thing should have ended earlier — but it sure was fun. About the only thing it was missing was one or both managers picking their least-worst-hitting starting pitchers to pinch-hit. (Glavine and Smoltz?) Along the way…well, I'm not quite sure I can remember. When Gary reminded us that early in the game Lo Duca got hit in the wrist by Andruw Jones's backswing, I was startled: Wasn't that like last week? Even Billy Wagner giving up a pinch-hit home run to Wilson Betemit was a bit aged in the memory by the time this one was over. Which is best for Billy, as it will mute the muttering in tomorrow's papers and blogs somewhat. Though not enough: I'm not ready to say something's wrong with Billy Wagner, but I did catch myself wondering if Billy Wagner's all right.

But anyway. At one point I dimly recall Steve Trachsel being infuriating, Carlos Beltran hitting a smooth and easy home run, Cliff Floyd hitting a sudden and very violent home run, Bobby Cox arguing about balls that haven't been strikes since Maddux and Glavine were atop the heap, wondering why on earth “Sir Duke” isn't Lo Duca's theme music, thinking I sure wish Roger McDowell wasn't wearing that uniform, an Australian pharmaceutical salesman making us look silly, laughing at Keith and Gary as they became increasingly unfit for narrating television, and finding it incredibly funny that they'd show the radar-gun readings of the four pitches of an intentional walk, which suggested I was becoming increasingly unfit for watching television.

In the end, two more-recent and lasting impressions to take into the night:

1. A game ball for Jorge Julio. Willie kept saying the right things about trusting him, but I bet he didn't have this in mind for Julio's first real test: straight into the lion's den to face Chipper and Andruw with no margin for error. He came out not only alive, but with Andruw's pelt. Nicely done.

2. We all know Carlos Beltran made a heads-up play when that ball eluded McCann in the 427th inning. (Or whatever it was.) But there's another reason to give thanks for his heads-upness: Wright's game-winning hit landed on the warning track and hopped into the bleachers. If Beltran hadn't taken second, that would have been a ground-rule double, and Beltran would have been sent back to third.

Second and third, two out…and I don't want to know.

To the rest of the world, Endy Chavez and Jose Hernandez are two unremarkable to flawed players. To me, they are behemoths. They have loomed over the past decade's Met fortunes like Shea ushers loom over the entrance to Field Level. They have gotten in the way of a perfectly good time on more occasions than I wish to remember and have added nothing positive to the Mets experience.

That's been my perception anyway. Reality seems to be catching up.

First, Chavez. Was I not the only Metsopotamian doing handstands when we signed him? That's not an Itol'yaso. It's more a matter of wondering why everybody didn't walk around haunted as I was by Endy Chavez's brilliance as a Montreal Expo at least as it pertained to his at-bats against us. During Mets games, Chavez was a .364 hitter in his Canadian guest worker days. After we got him, I figured that would eventually work to our advantage. Never even took into account that he brings defense and speed to the park (nor did I worry that Frank Robinson couldn't get rid of him fast enough — Frank Robinson looks like he'd play with a four-man roster if he could).

Now Endy, after a slow start that had the lumpenmetseteriat lumpin' him in with the J. Valentins and the J. Julios, has us all J. Umpin' for J. Oy. His catch last night must have been the fifth pretty great one he's made this year (and the fifteenth for the outfield as a whole). His running has been something this bench has lacked since, I don't know, Leon “Motor” Brown was in fine fettle, and now he's hitting for us like he batted against us. The Endy Chavez of my perception has caught up to the Endy Chavez of our reality.

So, alas, has the Jose Hernandez that I remember. Did I say he was unremarkable? The dude struck out 373 times in a two-year span, so I guess that would make him extraordinary, but not good. Yet I've been certain that Jose Hernandez is the Death Star. He is Derek Jeter without the commercial presence. He is John Rocker without having said a bad word about our public transportation. He is bad news for Mets fans.

Isn't he?

I got around to looking up his stats lifetime against the Mets. He must be batting .500, .600, maybe .700, I figured. Y'know what his lifetime average is versus New York (N)?

After last night, it's .243 with 10 home runs and 28 runs batted in in 214 at-bats. In the imaginary full season, those are very decent power numbers for a shortstop, but not the Garciaparran-in-his-prime explosion I imagined. And he doesn't even get on base against us in three out of every ten attempts.

So why did I totally expect him to be the trouble he was in the middle of that horrible ninth-inning rally last night? Because I have a fan's selective memory.

This is what I remember about Jose Hernandez:

• That he collected three hits and blasted a how-dare-you? home run against us as a Cub on July 25, 1998 in a huge Wild Card implications game. We lost 3-2 and we finished that season one game behind the Cubs and Giants for a playoff spot. I've blamed a lot of people for that shortfall, and Jose Hernandez is in the Top 10.

• That in the Greatest Game Ever Played, he came off the bench and calmly delivered a two-run single with two out to double our archnemeses' lead over us, stanch our momentum just enough to make our night's, year's and life's task a tad too daunting and, though we wouldn't know if for five more innings, wreck what should have been our historic “first team in the history of baseball to overcome a three-game deficit in the postseason” status. Jose Hernandez was an Atlanta Brave for 56 games. One of them had to be Game Six, didn't it?

• Last night and how he undid Pedro Martinez's W, unhinged Billy Wagner's invincibility and unearthed two of the worst memories I have in Mets rooting (three, counting the obvious analogy to that Friday night in Pittsburgh last July). That all's well ended well doesn't absolve him the least little bit.

I imagine the guy has done other nasty things against us given all the years he's been around and all the teams he's been on, but these are plenty. I don't need to know of any more. Sometimes perception is close enough to reality. The reality is Jose Hernandez is one of the worst Metkillers (therefore one of the worst people) who has ever lived. He's worse than Endy Chavez ever was because Endy Chavez is making up for his crimes against humanity practically every night.

As long as we're resuscitating Jose Valentin and regurgitating Jose Offerman (again!), we couldn't grab Jose Hernandez from the Pirates and stick him somewhere where he couldn't have hurt us? He may only hit .243 against us, but it's the most haunting .243 I've ever seen.

Or perceived.

I knew from the get-go that last night would be one of those catch-as-catch-can games, grabbed by bits and pieces while out and about. That's one of the joys of baseball, after all — when life dictates that you be elsewhere, you can nearly always sneak off for a half-inning or at least a quick update. (And most of the time, some truly marooned baseball fan will chase after you and beg to know the score.) Mindful of the Greg Commandments, I was carrying my portable radio.

A portable radio is your friend — mine is a nondescript little silver thing with a loop that lets it hang around my neck. The letters have long since worn off of it, and each spring I have to figure out what button does what through trial and error, but a few minutes' refresher course usually suffices — it's a portable radio, after all, not the space shuttle. I carry a pair of earbud headphones as well, and it's the easiest thing to put the radio around your neck under your shirt, pop one earbud in and keep track of the game while remaining at least nominally part of the world. I've even become fairly good at putting the bud in the opposite ear and carrying on a conversation. (Emily may dispute this.)

As excuses for not watching/listening to a whole game go, I had a good one: Last night was the second installment of Varsity Letters, a monthly showcase of great sportswriting read by the authors. Tonight's authors were Mark Lamster, whose “Spalding's World Tour” sounds like an intriguing look at 19th-century baseball; David Margolick, writer of “Beyond Glory,” about the 1938 rematch between Joe Louis and Max Schmelling; and Jeff Pearlman, whose new Barry Bonds bio, “Love Me, Hate Me,” I devoured last week. If you're in New York City the first Wednesday of next month, drop by.

I listened to the first inning while walking across the Manhattan Bridge, marveling that I'd barely heard of most of the Pirates. (Freddy Sanchez? Ronny Paulino?) Ian Snell's on my Rotisserie team, setting up an unstoppable force/immovable object debate, since the universe seems to have dictated as laws of physics that the Mets can't hit rookie starters and that my fantasy team sucks. But I couldn't tell you what Snell looks like, beyond guessing he's bipedal. Across the bridge, I stepped outside the astonishingly tasty, astonishingly dirt-cheap Dumpling House in Chinatown (I'm full of recommendations today) to hear David Wright and Cliff Floyd's misery continue. Then we made our way to Varsity Letters.

And then, an interlude. Look, a portable radio is a must-have, but there are some situations in which even a subtle bud-in-one-ear is verboten: The list includes weddings (during the actual ceremony, in the receiving line, whenever your significant other threatens you with bodily harm), funerals (the whole shebang) and when authors are reading from the books they spent so much time and trouble writing. Even were I not a writer myself, I like to think my vestigial sense of decency would have seen me through this one.

After the reading, I popped a bud back in my ear — just in time to hear “Enter Sandman.”

“3-1 Mets, Wagner on his way in,” I told my companions, offering a jaunty little thumbs-up because hey, these were the Pirates. I even let myself think that this was a pretty nice fantasy-baseball outcome: Pedro would be 6-0 and Snell couldn't have pitched too badly in the loss, so it was all good. Perhaps that's when the Baseball Gods decided punishment was in order: Suddenly those anonymous 2006 Pirates became the anonymous 2005 Pirates who sank their pointy little teeth into Braden Looper's hinder one dreary night last July: Tike Redman and Humberto Cota, meet Jose Hernandez and Ronny Paulino. As the authors shook hands and signed books, I stood in the middle of the room frozen in shock and dismay, hand over one ear.

Extra innings passed largely without me, because I was risking being rude and because the night had already demonstrated that I wasn't exactly a good-luck charm. Another of the joys of baseball on the radio: Listen for a second or two in extra innings and you know what's going on, even if they don't tell you the score. Howie and Tom chatting matter-of-factly about the weather with the Pirates up was a pretty good indication that I could check in again after a couple of minutes. So it went until, finally, one more check before heading out into the night….

“Delgado being mobbed by his teammates!”

Hmmm. Did he just win them over with a stirring declamation about the bombing of Vieques? Did he just do something really cool with the donut in the on-deck circle?

No, silly. That's a walkoff. No thanks to me, but I'll take it all the same.

Seriously, last night was probably the worst game of the year to watch from start to finish. Unless you thrill to rookie lefties having their way with us, it was the kind of night meant for flipping channels. I found myself wandering up and down the remote so much that I was surprised I caught as many interesting things as I did.

1) A black cat raced into extreme right field and disappeared behind the 338 sign, put off, I'm guessing, by all those distasteful Byrd droppings around home plate. Cats are clean animals and don't care for that kind of rude behavior. The cat was not identified by name. I don't think it was this fella, who is apparently a Mets fan and is billed as a Feline Prince (but is no relation to my Hozzie or my Avery). As long as they're going to try to honor a little Mets history among all the great Dodger history in the Park to be Named Later, maybe they can call the visitors' dugout the Kitty Corner in recognition of the role another black cat played in the 1969 pennant race. Better yet, they could work with trained professionals to rescue some of King Felix's minions, get them some necessary veterinary care, keep them from reproducing, find them some homes or at least fill the Top Hat with some water and let the gang get hydrated. Cats don't really need milk. It gives them the runs…and not like the three Marlon Byrd provided for Mike O'Connor.

2) Ron Darling admitted he would have liked to have returned to pitch for the Mets after he was traded because he was stuck on 99 Mets wins and wanted the round number. I didn't think players cared about those things. Darling had 136 wins in his career but it actually bothered him not to get to 100 as a Met. That's neat enough to make one overlook the No. 33 Greatest Met of the First Forty Years' pedestrian broadcasting skills and inability to come up big on a handful of occasions.

3) Spike Lee was in a DiamondView Suite wearing what appeared to be a brand, spankin' new Mets cap. In an in-game interview (the best kind while silly ol' baseball is taking place down on the field), he was kvelling over Omar and Willie and his old/new favorite team. I'm tempted to say, Spike, make up your mind as to whether you're a Mets fan or a fan of some other local squadron. I guess he has. Whichever team is doing well, he's a big fan. He grew up rooting for whichever team was doing well. He remains loyal to whichever team is in first place. He's the No. 1 celebrity supporter of whichever team is kicking ass. That Spike Lee, he sure knows how to run in front. (Other big names who make their way to Shea prefer to skate).

4) Gary Cohen name-checked one of our favorite blolleagues, Mark of Mets Walkoffs. The answer to the AFLAC (AF-LAC!) trivia question was essentially Mark's post, the one that celebrated Monday night's win with the story of the last time the Mets won a game when the opposing pitcher threw away the winning run. Congrats to Mark for a deserving shoutout. Kudos as ever to Gary Cohen for citing only the best sources. And screw you, Darold Knowles, just on principle.

5) John Maine pitched OK. I guess we'll see him again. He wasn't really all that interesting.

FLUSHING (FAFIF) — Mike O'Connor didn't feign surprise at his success versus the New York Mets Tuesday night.

“The Mets?” the celebrated lefty asked after accepting congratulations from his Washington teammates. “Never heard of 'em.”

When told that in fact the Mets had been in the National League since 1962 and have been leading its eastern division by a wide margin most of the year, the 25-year-old pitcher just shook his head.

“Nah,” he said. “Doesn't ring a bell.”

O'Connor swore he meant no disrespect to those who provided the nominal competition in his second Major League start: “Listen, you face teams all the time. Sometimes they're familiar, sometimes they aren't. Tonight was the first time I've ever seen the Nets.”

Reminded that the Nets are a basketball team leading the Indiana Pacers in the NBA playoffs, O'Connor quickly corrected himself: “My bad. I meant, uh…I'm sorry, what's their name again?”

A Mike O'Connor can be forgiven his ignorance regarding the relative obscurity of an opponent that garnered all of two hits across seven innings. O'Connor is, after all, the reigning Washington Nationals minor league pitcher of the year. He's just become a one-game winner in the big leagues. Most of all, he's a recently promoted southpaw in the best tradition of household names like Chad Zerbe and Brian Barnes. Fans of the New York Mets certainly remember who they are even if they'd have a tough time identifying who their own pitcher was Tuesday.

O'Connor, on the other hand, can't be expected to differentiate among all the teams he's beaten. The Mets certainly did nothing to leave an imprint on his psyche. They can't waste a lot time worrying about their anonymity, however. Wednesday night, they face the daunting task of batting against Pirate starter Ian Snell.

Yes, that Ian Snell. Mike O'Connor and Ian Snell on consecutive nights…makes you wonder whether anybody will hear from these Mets again.

Wanna play in October? You gotta win blowouts and squeakers, extra-inning games and rain-shortened affairs, day games after night games and the tail end of doubleheaders. Included somewhere in that list are games that appeared headed for extra innings except the enemy reliever makes a nice pickup and unleashes disaster. Gary Majewski had a tailor-made double play in front of him, except he threaded the needle so perfectly that Royce Clayton tipped the ball over Jose Vidro's shoulder, ensuring the Nats went home in rags.

An attaboy for Victor Zambrano, who finally pitched aggressively and saw that (whodathunkit?) good things happen when you do. At least for one game Victor wasn't running away from his own stuff; that first-inning K of Nick Johnson with a fastball in on the hands gave me hope that I might not have to spend the evening swearing hideously and throwing things. Still, I kept thinking about “Bull Durham” and Nuke LaLoosh. Not that Victor is anything like the Tim Robbins character in most respects: He's old, timid, doesn't seem to be having any fun and as far as I can tell isn't sleeping with Susan Sarandon. But like Nuke, he needs a catcher who will tell him exactly what to do, and smack him in the nose until he stops doing anything else. Rick Peterson's 10 minutes have become an eternity because Zambrano isn't ever going to learn to trust his own stuff. OK, fine — since Paul Lo Duca trusts Zambrano's stuff, Plan B is that Victor learns to trust Paul Lo Duca.

Well, at least for a night it worked — it was no coincidence that when SNY caught up with Lo Duca after all was said and done, the first thing out of the catcher's mouth was praise for Zambrano.

Can one small step for Zam be a giant leap for Metkind? Here's hoping. And in the meantime? The rose goes in the front, big guy.

If April has produced the template for the rest of the season — fly extraordinarily high, descend without necessarily crashing and then up, up and away in our beautiful balloon — I'll take it.

No broom for sweeping, but no Electrolux for sucking either. The difference between the Mets and the Braves on Sunday came down to one attachment: Atlanta is attached to Jeff Francoeur and we're not. He brought his rake to the park and that was that. Some days you have to decompress like a leaf blower and move on.

So it's only a 2-1 visit to the heretofore Horrible House and only a 6-4 road trip that included two stops three time zones away and only a 16-8 record and only a 6-game lead over everybody.

If only always felt like this, I think we'd all want to drink alone come October. Oops, did I mention the O-Month? Too soon? Of course it is. Let's not end the suspense even if the only two teams to enjoy greater April leads were the '77 Dodgers and '01 Mariners and they both extended their seasons beyond Game 162. Never mind that they didn't win ultimate prizes or that the previous Mets team to secure 16 April victories was the 2002 edition. That bunch won 59 more from May through September, so let's not get carried away.

Instead of the big picture, a few smaller snapshots:

• I sure hope Cliff Floyd starts hitting. He's shown signs. He's lined a ton of hard fouls and atom balls. He's had a handful of bouncers and bloopers fall in, the kind that are supposed to change your luck. Yet he's driving from Georgia to New York in the slow lane of the Eisenhower Interstate System. I'm watching Cliff lunge and flail and I think back to Bernard Gilkey in '97 and Howard Johnson in '92, two Met outfielders coming off huge seasons and not coming close to repeating them. HoJo got hurt and never recovered. Gilkey needed glasses or something. Cliff is doing more than either of them in their dark forest period. However many wins Glavine winds up with, he must insist that his Cooperstown plaque specifies one of them was made possible by the mitt and moxie of Cliff Floyd. His two catches on Saturday night — one off Pratt, one off Francoeur (a sneak preview of his Sunday matinee raking) — were the difference between “same old Turner Field curse” and “no more Turner Field curse”. It's a team game and Cliff is contributing to the team in almost every way he can. Here's hoping he can contribute in his most characteristic way. Though he's filling the Anderson Hernandez all-field/no-hit role with aplomb, I don't think that's what he wants to be doing.

• Carlos Beltran can run and hit. We persevered and practically thrived in his absence. Our world didn't end while he healed…a good advertisement for caution amid the long season.

• The heart of the order back intact may mean less pressure for David Wright, a young man who has been issued a ridiculous amount of it by well-meaning folk such as ourselves. Metstradamus offers the only kind of take he is capable of producing, an excellent one, on how our Wright-loving instincts and interests are best-served.

• The untouchables need to be embraced. Jose Valentin hasn't hit for spit, I grant you, but didja see the take-out check he laid on Marcus Giles to break up a DP? Applaud that. Jorge Julio, stray gopher notwithstanding, put in two more solid innings. Get behind that. Kaz Matsui saved the day throughout the trip. Put your hands together for that. Victor Zambrano hasn't done a damn thing well, but he's one-fifth of the rotation. Ya like your first-place Mets? Like all your first-place Mets. Not one of these fellas deserves to be booed Monday night. They return 2-1 from Atlanta, 6-4 from the road, 16-8 from April, 6 up from everybody. These are your returning baseball heroes. Greet them all as such. You're nuts if you don't.

Unsolicited Metsosphere Plug: Piazza, Cameron, Jacobs, et al are gone, but we have one Mike we can still count on, the Mike who writes Mike's Mets. This Mike, making Connecticut safe for Mets fans since 2005, is an incredibly solid read when it comes to keeping up on everything in our world. Make him a part of your Metsian rounds.

So now it's three times that the Mets have won the first two games of a series at Turner Field. Seeing as how we've switched off our vacuum cleaners, I do not believe it is too much to ask for a broom.

We're done sucking. We must start sweeping.

It isn't all for naught if we don't take three of three, but what's stopping us? We owe Kyle Davies for last week and we owe Steve Trachsel a little more than he's received from us in the past, if just to make up for the jerking around he's taken in the rotation. Not that I haven't supported it on occasion or abandoned him now and then, but when researching yesterday's post about the Mets' jarring lack of follow-through at Turner Field, I couldn't help but notice how many times S. Trachsel got S. Crewed, pitching just well enough to lose to a team that didn't know how not to win, certainly when it came to winning against us.

Let's put that behind us, much the way we've put behind us the notion that we can't escape tight ninth innings in that tired pile of bricks, just like we're putting behind us a road trip that would have rendered us inoperative in the past, almost any past. We've played nine games on this journey, three in San Francisco where little usually goes right and two in Atlanta where everything always goes wrong. In the face of travel and history and time zone tomfoolery, we're 6-3 with one to go. The key phrase is one to go. Need that be explained?

The Mets are seven games up on everybody. The Mets haven't ever been seven games up and given them all back. In 1972 — the achy-breaky year when a Carlos Beltran wouldn't have returned as he did Saturday night — our high-water mark was 6-1/2 ahead before injuries and the Pirates drowned us. In none of the other seasons when we played footsie with first without eventually winning did we build any kind of tremendously substantial lead. Say this for the Mets: They haven't captured many divisional flags, but they haven't blown many either.

Can't control what the Phillies, Nats and Fish do today (yes, I'm still tracking the Marlins; you never know until you know), but we've got the very next game the Braves play in our hands. It wouldn't kill us to return home with a six-game margin over them. It wouldn't kill us to make it eight, either.

We're nine over .500 for the first time since the end of 2000. We got to eight over in the 128th game of 2005 and then slipped our way to four under three weeks later before recovering to four over. There is no particular magic in being nine over after 23 dates as we are now. There is no irreparable harm in being eight over after 24. It wouldn't kill us to make it ten over, either.

What I'm saying is I really want a win today. It's strange territory, being in Atlanta wanting a win instead of needing a win. Good teams don't know the difference.

We've got a good team.