As we mourners steel ourselves for the final viewing of the greatest dramatic arc in the history of television (9 o'clock on HBO), the temptation to bury the 2005 Mets, or at least take out a pre-need on their behalf, hovers yet again in our souls. Sunday afternoon's loss to the Nationals, while a smidge less lethal in its execution than Saturday night's win, was in fact a loss. If five seasons of watching Six Feet Under has taught me anything, it's that the best way to deal with loss is to confront it immediately without repressing the facts or your feelings.

In the interest, then, of healthy grieving:

• Benson had nothing except good graces to sit in the dugout and watch three relievers labor effectively to clean up after him, barn door wide open.

• Almost every attempt at a rally — save for the transcendent moment when Shea Stadium became Jacobs' field — fizzled embarrassingly.

• In the seventh, Cliff had probably the worst at-bat of the season, his or anybody's, against Joey Eischen when he lunged toward, flailed at and avoided contact with three decidedly outside pitches.

• Florida, Philadelphia and Houston each won…natch.

• All the ground we made up less than 24 hours ago has been shoveled right back on us in last place.

• Distant roads are callin'. Seven games in Arizona and San Francisco aren't seven games in Atlanta and St. Louis, but the Mets have treated every road trip as if the home team is a division champ. No time left for that.

• Seven games in Atlanta and St. Louis are, by the way, just around the corner.

• Cameron is done. Piazza is out. Castro is exhausted. There is no first baseman per se. Floyd is trying to do too much. Beltran, no matter how valiant his return, has to be considered a question mark. Diaz is a terrific designated hitter who looks worse in right than he did when the season started. Trachsel has no slot and little patience, though you can't blame him for either situation. The pen is the pen is the pen. That's a story as old as Robert Moses.

To distill Jewish Heritage Day to its essence, oy.

This, like all those other instances when we were tempted, is no time to bury the Mets. But will it ever be time to declare they are truly alive and well and likely to go out on top the way my favorite show has?

Everyone's waiting.

Apparently holding a post-game concert wasn't enough of a way to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Night. The Mets collectively played as if they were descended from the would-be 15th-century conquistador El Choko (he had almost all of Europe under his control when he decided his most splendid warrior should abandon the battle after throwing 78 pitches), while the Nationals were doing their best impression of El Kabong.

It was as if somebody hijacked the Ameriquest runs bell: Ka-BONGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!

As for it being Dog Night, I had a feeling it would be a horrendous idea to permit those smelly, pathetic mutts into the ballpark.

But enough about our relievers.

Nobody except the Mets Walkoffs guy loves a walkoff win more than me, but this was ridiculous. If baseball had a commissioner who wasn't Bud Selig, I'd suggest he investigate how it's possible that a team capable of blowing an 8-0 seventh-inning lead to the lowest-scoring team in the National League also managed to gain ground in a Wild Card race that's tighter than the apple in Braden Looper's throat.

Look at us!

We're a contender!

We're two games out!

We've matched our high point for the year at four games above .500!

Something stinks here, but technically, we don't. In reality, we've got relievers who are incapable of protecting eight-run leads with nine outs to go, closers who can't close out two-run leads with one out to go, catchers with fractures who are sitting on the active roster, healthy starters who are left in limbo and a lineup that took a disco nap from the fourth through the ninth. By then, our laugher was long ago and it was far away.

Fortunately, we also have Chris Woodward. There aren't enough words to describe how grateful we should be for him. There aren't enough words because when Brian Schneider doubled in the tying run, I hurled the first thing handy in the general direction of the television and it happened to be a dictionary — ironic in that my vocabulary had just been reduced to a single f-word.

We won. I'm totally disgusted.

I guess it was also Paradox Night.

Friday night's promotional handout was smart, compact and may even work the next time wet rain falls for real, but I prefer we let Jae Seo be our umbrella. He protects us against all kind of bad elements: Wilkerson, Vidro, Schneider…such unappealing sorts you should never encounter in a dark alley or a well-lit ballpark.

He also keeps Kaz Ishii far, far away.

It's a one-game winning streak for the Mets as well as for me — 1-0 in the Stars & Stripes cap that I nearly left on the train home but, like the Mets and their need for a run, remembered to grab at almost the last minute.

How marvy it was to land on the right side of a shutout at Shea. Laurie and I continued our trail of tiers, this time landing in the upper deck, a fine place to take in a game of baseball and a view of Queens, even though I can never quite shake the feeling that I've volunteered for stadium steerage. Shea only has an upper deck, I believe, because it can't economically shove enough people in the lower levels. Reminds me of a bit Bruce McCulloch did on The Kids in the Hall in which he was a minimum-wage employee. I paraphrase: “Minimum wage? You mean you're paying me the very least allowable by law?”

If the Mets could stick their budget/tardy/non-alcoholic customers on the moon, I think they would.

But I'm not complaining, not really. We had a successful duel and I had an adequate knish (conceding to the first concession that didn't require an extended wait along the limited-assortment concourse) plus a middle-innings summit with one of our esteemed blolleagues. I don't want to drop any names, but let's just say that as soon as the Mets scored, he had to walk off to his assigned seat.

Quite a horse race, this Wild Card chase. Being in the upper deck means being at eye-level with the scoreboard, and being as much of a contender as we apparently are, I couldn't take my eyes off of it. I wished for significance from every score. I wanted CIN's demolition of ARI to mean something other than a few sad ARIzonans. Maybe they'll still be despondent when we go out there. Though I was into it in principle, I couldn't get that much pleasure from SDP taking it to ATL since ATL is largely irrelevant to the standing of NYM. PIT, on the other hand, is to be congratulated on slamming PHI in the battle of PEN (yeah, I know it's PA but I'll bet the Shea scoreboard operator doesn't).

It was Irish Night. No great significance to it except one guy brought his bagpipes to the upper deck. Just him — no band or corps or whatever more than one bagpipist constitutes. Laurie called bagpipes the worst instrument ever invented. I have yet to rank them, but there's an Awesomely Bad VH-1 countdown just waiting to be produced.

As National League fans we're supposed to proclaim that there's nothing like a pitching duel — a crisp, clean, 1-0 game.

I beg to differ.

It's not that I don't appreciate a good pitching duel — I do. But like them? Not so fast. I only like the ones we win. Lose a back-and-forth 8-7 game, and at least you had seven fists pumps and, odds are, some stretches in which your team was on top and the world was at your command. A pitching duel isn't like that — it's three or four innings of fidgeting and five or six of anxiety and agony, and the only release from it comes when it's over and you've won. If you win.

Jae Seo was awesome, I'd like to announce. (Also, the sun rose today and the rain that briefly fell was wet.) He's been around so long it's even harder to grasp that this man on the mound with the deadly arsenal and the oodles of self-confidence is the same guy we've been tracking up and down through our system all these years. There was the period in which all we knew was he was a great prospect and his brother was in the minor leagues with him. (Just to ease the culture shock, it turned out.) Then his arm was hurt. Then he arrived and was, well, OK. Then he was good. Then he wasn't so good and Vern Ruhle had to go to the mound and challenge him to show some heart, not usually a sign of a bright future. Then he went from the guy who it was whispered was uncoachable to the guy who it was shouted was uncoachable — and got bounced from the slot in the starting rotation he assumed he'd earned. (Though his ill-advised line “If I have one bad start at Norfolk, will they send me to Binghamton?” was pretty funny.) Then he was back and good, then he was gone despite that, letting us see plenty of Kaz Ishii, and now he's back and he's coachable and he's getting the entire planet out and there is no earthly way he's coming out of this rotation.

Wow. Forget what they say about second acts and American lives — apparently there are nine or 10 acts in Korean baseball-player lives. Bravo, Seo. Glad we waited for you.

As for John Patterson, he only made one mistake, but it was a fairly dopey one — why anyone on God's green Earth would throw Victor Diaz a fastball right now is beyond me. Meanwhile, Victor can apparently only play the rudiments of one position at a time — he looked OK in right field earlier this year, but now anything hit vaguely that way leaves me in the fetal position. I was actually thrilled to see Gerald Williams.

Oh, and Looper of course tried to blow it — that was awfully nice of Jose Guillen to swing at a ball he couldn't possibly do anything with when Looper was having trouble throwing the ball over the plate. I'd had my fill of anxiety and agony by then, thanks very much, but a pitcher's duel wouldn't be a pitcher's duel if you weren't gasping in fear until the very last out, right?

Pedro and Livan tomorrow night. Emily and I will be there. I'm already nervous.

Whoa.

The Pirates may be the Pirates — add “the same overeager young player getting thrown out trying to stretch a two-out double twice in one game” to the list of things I'd never seen in baseball — but every fifth day from here on out, I want no part of them. Zach Duke is awesome, man. Evil curveballs, good heat, excellent location, fearless. And tricky — he unveiled a slider in the fourth inning of a no-hit bid that left Cliff Floyd shaking his head somewhere between admiration and anger, like he best beware or in the seventh young Mr. Duke might find a knuckleball in his apparently bottomless bag of tricks.

At least this wasn't the usual script of a shaking-in-his-boots rookie bringing in an ERA north of 5 and then beating us like rented mules. The kid was just good. He even looks like a lot like a young Paul Wilson, though I hope that's no harbinger of his future.

On our side, well, just tip your cap. Victor was bad — he's alternated good starts and bad starts for nearly a month now, which has got to stop — but even good wasn't going to get it done tonight. Which left it a night for scoreboard-watching. Marlins won, Phillies and Nats obediently split their doubleheader, and our good friends the Brewers overcome the Astros (with the Antichrist on the mound, no less). Could've been worse.

Three out. Forty-two to play. That's doable, ain't it?

Did I hold my breath when Beltran stepped to the plate? Hell yes. Did I hold it when he raced toward home and it looked like there might be a play at the plate? Double hell yes.

I was proud to see that Met fans suspended their half-season of hazing to give Beltran a standing O. (Not to turn this into a discourse on booing, but Carlos has tried his hardest, played hurt earlier in the year– admirable even if perhaps not wise — and his stats haven't been Rich Rodriguez-level hideous, so enough was enough long ago.) But I was prouder to see that he turned in an absolutely terrific game — one that purists and small-ball lovers ought to clutch to their hearts. Over at MetsGeek, Matt Gelb has a great article using CBS Sportsline Game Charts to show how disciplined Beltran was on a night when just showing up was worthy of applause. Jose Reyes and Victor Diaz would do well to take a look at that final diagram.

Oddly, I also felt a bit sorry for Mike Gonzalez in the eighth — knowing he was pitching to a man with a broken cheekbone in the first game back in his home park meant he had to cede the inner half of the plate or risk facing 25 Mets and a crowd turned into a mob. This pitching thing, it's hard enough as it is.

On the subject of redemption, that was a heck of a game for Aaron Heilman, and not just because I never want to see Braden Looper face the Pirates again. One of baseball's many joys and terrors is the way situations repeat, and like every other Met fan I flashed back to L.A. and Heilman coming into to relieve Zambrano last week. That turned into a disaster; this turned into a triumph. A little late for poor Victor, but critically important for Heilman's confidence, Willie's confidence in him, and (getting ahead of ourselves just a bit) Heilman's career arc going forward. Heilman may never develop a gunfighter stare and would probably look silly if he tried — he always looks like a junior-high-school kid about to fail a German final — but his tricky mix of pitches and their late movement can glower for themselves.

Oh, and we won the game. That was nice too.

* From the sublime to the trivial: Mike Jacobs, incidentally, won the Cyclones' inaugural game in Brooklyn on June 25, 2001, before a packed house of dignitaries and a borough full of ghosts. Good game, too: With two out in the ninth, Edgar Rodriguez smacked a two-run homer to tie it; in the 10th, the Mahoning Valley Scrappers walked Robert McIntyre intentionally to get to Jacobs, who'd struck out four times. Sac fly, ball game.

Hopefully Jacobs doesn't get Hietpas'd and gets an at-bat. And maybe gets some other '01 Cyclones for company — Angel Pagan, Blake McGinley and Jason Scobie were all fairly significant members of that team, and some or all might get a look in September. Danny Garcia, an '01 Cyclone for a moment, has already come and gone, and a couple of other first-year Cyclones have at least had big-league cups of coffee elsewhere. Not a bad haul for a New York-Penn League roster.

Ever since you went all elegiac on Mike Piazza, he hasn't hit a home run. And now he's got a fractured hand.

Try toughlove next time. Or ballet .

Mike Jacobs, when he plays, will be the 768th Met ever. That's exactly 100 Mets since the end of 2001, 100 brand new players — four rosters' worth — to take the field in less than four years. Does that seem stable to you?

I don't think either of us ever commented on Doug Mientkiewicz's current injury, probably because it's hard to recall where one bizarre stay on the DL ended and where the next one began. He hurt himself butting bodies with Rickie Weeks in a Pyrrhically successful breakup of a DP. Next shot we saw of him, he was all gimp in the dugout. Then it was Doug…out.

It's not a knock on the guy to say I sort of haven't noticed his extended absence what with all the drama that's swirled about of late. I'm at the point where I don't expect to see Doug Mientkiewicz play for the Mets. Every time he does, it's a little gift, I suppose.

I actually heard myself call Glavine “Glavo” when he finished the seventh. I need to cut that stuff out.

Poor Royals. I mean, really, 18 in a row? Would it screw us up terribly if they sent Super Joe our way? I doubt KC's troubles are all his fault and there's no way he deserves to live through all that. (Tony LaRussa kept a pair of his shoes, you may have heard.) What harm could he do here? I read the other day that he and Kaz would go out for sushi on every road trip last year. Maybe Matsui misses his buddy.

Tike Redman hates us. I'm sure of it. Seeing Gerald Williams soaking up what he believes to be Prentice's roster spot probably just inflames his ire even more.

Did you shudder every time Carlos Beltran was in motion Wednesday night? That he didn't is to the better. Gary Cohen pretty much nominated him for Comeback Player of the Year (intraseason version) based on his first two plate appearances. Such an assessment seemed a little gun-jumping. Sure hope it's true, but one game at a time for Carlos, one game at a time for us.

We're 2-1/2 back of a playoff spot with 43 to play. That's a matter of public record. And it indicates nothing about final positioning.

I got so excited in late July 1997 when the Mets nosed ahead of the Marlins for a moment. “If the season ended today,” I breathlessly told my apathetic sister, “the Mets would be in the playoffs.”

Suzan, whose relationship to baseball was tied to resentment over non-Mets games airing on her favorite talk station, replied earnestly, “I wish the season ended today.”

It's still the funniest thing she's ever said.

You know who this was a big game to? Kris Benson. Only one man in North America circles starts against the Pittsburgh Pirates and it is he. On the pregame, Howie warned that Benson would have to control his emotions in these circumstances. I doubt anybody's gotten terribly worked up over facing Pittsburgh since Orel Hershiser. So Benson'll probably remember Tuesday night, and good for him if beating his old team fires him up.

By the by, am I the ONLY person in all of Metsopotamia who remembers that Hershiser's very worthy foe on that tense afternoon of October 3, 1999 was a rookie named Kris Benson? Before he became ours, that's almost all I knew about the guy, that he pitched brilliantly against us at the worst possible time but that it was a beautiful thing, in a dispassionate sense — the eager pup taking on the grizzled vet with everything on the line. It was beautiful because it eventually worked to our favor, of course, but it was a happening no matter how it came out. When the Mets acquired Kris Benson, I assumed that his featured role one of the great days in one of the great stretches of Mets history, the 1999 run to redemption, would be at least a sidebar to somebody's story. But I didn't see it mentioned anywhere and I've yet to hear a thing out of Kris's mouth about it. I suppose nobody's asked him.

Can't get down on Gerald Williams for being less than adept in center. The Post Tuesday ran a picture of him saving Dwight Gooden's no-hitter with another team on a play sort of like the one he didn't make in L.A. Sunday (except that he, you know, made it for Gooden). I was going to fume at him for suddenly forgetting how to leap and grab except that was more than nine years ago. Pressed into unforeseen service, Williams has batted better than any of us could have anticipated. And yeah, there has to be a slightly warmer body on the depth chart to take it from here, but being mad at Gerald Williams after he's delivered four hits in nine at-bats over the last three games seems particularly Sheavian in its harshness.

This was one of those nights that has lulled me all season. I guess there have been just enough of them so it felt familiar: a relatively easy win over a not particularly daunting opponent (not that we take anybody for granted around here), ground picked up at every turn, a GB for the WC that doesn't look too bad. It's the kind of night that sends me to the magnetic schedule to start considering possibilities. And that's always the wrong thing to do because no good ever comes of “well, if we win these two and take two of three from them and then we go to…” Play 'em one game at a time. Hope for the best. Check the schedule only for start times and bobblehead dates.

While I try not to look ahead too optimistically (and thus inadvertently wish the Mets into the proverbial cornfield with my sensational if undiagnosed extra-sensory impact on their on-field fortunes) and attempt to avoid unhelpful projections, I do notice a trend of sorts.

A trend? Why didn't you say so? Do dish!

Here are the National League Central and West teams we've played on the road this year:

Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Colorado, Houston, San Diego, Los Angeles.

Here are the National League Central and West teams we've played on the road this year and lost series to in their parks:

Cincinnati, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Colorado, Houston, San Diego, Los Angeles.

We took two out of three in Milwaukee.

From that subset, we've played our full complement of home games against Cincinnati, Chicago, Houston, San Diego and Los Angeles, winning each of those Shea season series.

We lost two out of three to Milwaukee.

Total reckoning from these games, including Benson's Bucfest: 25-22; a horrid 8-17 on the road, a luminescent 17-5 at home. For a team that's done no better than float just a bit over .500 now and again, I suppose this figures.

Does it mean anything? Well, we have six out-of-division home games left with teams we've finished our road work against: two versus Pittsburgh, four at the very end with Colorado. You want to be so bold as to make inferences from those, be my guest. But don't tell me about it. I don't wanna know.

It gets tricky looking at the out-of-division teams we've played at Shea but not yet elsewhere:

Arizona 2-1 (4 remaining)

San Francisco 2-1 (3 remaining)

St. Louis 1-2 (4 remaining)

That's eleven road games, all — can't pound at this enough — west of the Mississippi, which is where the flight gets brutally bumpy. When they returned from Los Angeles battered, bruised and down two outfielders, their W-of-the-M mark had festered to a futile 5-14. Consider the 14 losses included three straight to the maudlin Mariners and two to the risible Rockies. The Dodgers weren't such hot stuff either but we were in no position, post-collision, to look down our fractured noses at anybody.

Bottom line: 5-14 is ugly regardless of longitude.

The past isn't necessarily prologue. The Diamondbacks and Giants, both with losing records, don't have to loom eerily next week. Need I remind us that the Mariners and the Rockies looked like soft touches, too, and we went 1-5 on their respective turfs? I'd like to go the brain-dead sportstalk route and tell you “the Mets are at a soft spot in their schedule so pencil them in for X wins,” but such thinking is evidence of a soft spot in the head. Like I said, play 'em one game at a time and hope like hell that everybody who needs to lose loses and everybody who needs to lose who plays each other splits.

Now some glad tidings from New York. You may recall a few weeks ago, after we swept the San Diegans, I put together a pennant-pooper chart, a cautionary-tale table tracking the peak positions of some neocontender years of reasonably recent vintage. Instead of linking, I reprint:

Through 107 games in 1991, the Mets were 57-50, 5-1/2 out of first in the N.L. East.

Final record: 77-84.

Through 96 games in 1992, the Mets were 48-48, 4 out of first in the N.L. East.

Final record: 72-90.

Through 94 games in 1996, the Mets were 46-48, 4-1/2 out of the Wild Card.

Final record: 71-91.

Through 106 games in 2002, the Mets were 55-51, 4-1/2 out of the Wild Card.

Final record: 75-86.

Through 94 games in 2004, the Mets were 47-47, 3 out of first in the N.L. East.

Final record: 71-91.

Here's the good news for us, albeit at the expense of us in campaigns gone by: We've outlasted all of those losers. We are through Game 118 now and the Mets are 60-58, 3-1/2 out of the Wild Card. At a stage where five of our pretender-predecessors shrunk from the task at hand, we continue to live and kick. The grim reaper, the one who buries seasons before school starts, has yet to be invited to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. We're not kicking ass and taking names the way we were after 118 decisions in 1986 (77-41) or 1999 (71-47), but we're still in this thing.

What's more, barring another even uglier episode of smashmouth baseball — this one with Wright crashing into Reyes and the two of them landing with a thunderous thud onto both of Floyd's legs (in a driving hail storm for good measure) — we're about to separate ourselves from 2004 by more than chronology. All season, it's been an easy out for lazy beat writers and lazier columnists who want to criticize the Mets to write something like, “For all the money/commotion/hype, the Mets have basically the same record as they did a year ago.” Indeed, at this stage in '04, the Mets were 57-61, closer to our record now than the 2005 Mets are at the moment to the Wild Card-leading Astros. Fair enough. But those Mets would keep it up exactly three games longer, maintaining marginal respectability through 121 contests. From 59-62, however, they'd plummet off the face of .500 like nobody's business.

I don't expect a 1-16 bender lurks around the corner. We may not shake off the win-one-or-two then lose-two-or-one syndrome that's plagued us and we may be beyond assistance if somebody else in this competition gets irreversibly hot, but we're having fun and having hope approximately three-quarters in. We can worry about the schedule and, in my case, worry that I'm worrying about the schedule too much. Feels pretty good to have that much to brood over.

We're 3-1/2 back of a playoff spot with 44 to play. Trachsel's returning. Beltran's returning. Neither is to be viewed as a lock contributor (I don't necessarily know Carlos strapping it on so soon is particularly wise), but Norfolk and Bingo reinforcements are two weeks away. If we can be just a little better than we've been for just a little while, there may actually be something to reinforce. There may be a September that isn't strictly academic.

Honestly, who could ask for anything more?

Miserable human being, absolutely remarkable pitcher…that can only mean there's some historical perspective on why Roger Clemens is a big, fat liar at Gotham Baseball.

Tonight's game was one of those games that fades quickly without leaving much of a trace — it's been over about three hours, and I can remember exactly three things from it:

1. Gerald Williams is apparently determined to prove in every single game that he cannot play center field. You know he had to be thinking, “Oh Lord” when a carbon copy of the Antonio Perez ball came hurtling out of the darkness toward him, just in case any Met fans were over thinking about him getting a crappy jump and missing the ball at the wall. Reminded me a bit of Luis Fucking Sojo's 94-hopper in the World Series that Kurt Abbott couldn't quite field, slamming our coffin shut and forcing us to seek cold comfort in muttering that Ordonez would've gotten it. So next year, in one of those tragedy-becomes-farce baseball moments, Sojo hits one in the Little Subway Series off Leiter, and it takes like 94 hops and just eludes Ordonez. You could hear an entire ballpark — well, OK, 60% of one — muttering to its neighbor.

But regarding Gerald Williams. I mean, what does it take? Remember the scene in “The Man With Two Brains” in which Steve Martin asks his wdow's spirit for guidance about whether he should marry Kathleen Turner? The house practically collapses in a hurricane of shattering objects and spectral screams, during which Steve stands there oblivious, saying, “A sign…anything…” C'mon, Omar — does the scoreboard have to start gushing blood like some crazed recreation of “The Shining” before you take this man off the roster?

2. David Wright doing a beautiful job turning an 0-2 hole into a walk — he reminds me of Alfonzo the way he can work out of bad counts — followed by Clifford hitting a no-doubter.

3. Todd Zeile showing up in the middle innings dressed like a “Partridge Family” character. If he was in costume or something, sorry, I missed it. Funny thing about baseball: In uniform Zeile looked old and small towards the end, but put him in civilian clothes (even ones from the Nixon administration) and he looks young and huge.

So bottle those three moments for posterity, because the rest is all slipping out of mind already. And after a trip that featured a horrifying collision, a Zambrano/Heilman choke job and a blown no-hitter, a fairly anonymous game was just fine with me.