…with a first step.

You seek wisdom in silly bumper-sticker things like that when you're beginning something big and hugely important that's gonna take a while and has to be done right each step of the way, even though you're desperate to know how it all turns out and want to hurry along. Like, say, a seven-game road trip to Arizona and then to California, the time zone where so many Met dreams have died.

I sensed as early as this afternoon that the scorecard for this one would have a few WWs on it, and indeed had no sooner put the kid to bed than I faceplanted onto my own pillow, pretty sure I was going to miss some or all of the game but helpless to prevent it. Woke up through sheer will to find it was sometime after 10:30 and dragged myself upstairs to turn on the set. It's an odd feeling flipping on the TV knowing it'll be the third or fourth — there's always that moment in which you're desperately processing information. Is that a “2” for us? Is that a “0” for them? So 2 is more than zero, so we're ahead! Yes! I did a worse job than usual, seeing how I was only vaguely awake — it took me two or three innings to grasp that Mike Jacobs was playing first (guess Jose Offerman needed an extra coat of shellac to hide his continuing decomposition), that Kaz was in the starting lineup, that that was DiFelice and finally not Castro and all the other things one would normally have taken care of by the time first pitch rolled around. I heard Heath Bell was up and never did figure out who was down.

Still, I was awake enough to grasp that Tom Glavine threw a terrific game and that Braden Looper redeemed himself, though I almost assaulted the television when Looper walked Tony Clark when it wouldn't have particularly mattered if Clark had hit one to Saturn. I think the best part of that ninth was how the double play unfolded: Wright didn't retreat on the ball, Matsui moved quickly and fearlessly on the pivot, and Jacobs made a nice stretch and held the bag. Not so long ago Wright might well have backed up and risked losing the double play or maybe the chance to get even one out, and/or Offerman/Woodward/Cairo/Anderson would have dropped the ball or let it skip past. Progress!

At the risk of jinxing the whole thing, I think we've collectively come around on Glavine. At least I have. His superb numbers since the break help, of course — good stats are always the best personality trait — but it's also that he finally yielded to the reality that the old Glavine formula wasn't working and became receptive to finding a new way. That option now looks like a lock, and to my surprise I find myself wondering if I'm not kinda sorta glad to have him. At the very least I'm willing to retire the TMB nickname in favor of something else.

So. Meet Tom Glavine, a.k.a. TEM — The Eventual Met.

I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell…

The Mets have run the Howard Beale clip from Network on DiamondVision for, I think, the last eight seasons. I don't have a handle on the success rate in terms of rallies and runs that stem from its still-clever-if-tired segue into the LET'S GO METS! chant, but it seems to get the fans going.

Peter Finch's contextless rant from almost 30 years ago is as good a limb as any on which to hang the Mets' marvelous home record. Even with Sunday's flopfest, they're 40-25 at Shea. That's a 100-win season if we could bribe Bud Selig to let us play all our games at home (and you know we probably could if we really tried). If it's not Network, maybe it's the landing pattern into LaGuardia or the mysterious wind swirls or the orange onslaught the opposition experiences from the unfilled field level seats. Whatever it is, we have a definite home-field advantage.

And we are helpless on the road. I won't re-enumerate the examples of our terrible tourism except to say that the Mets are 23-35 away from Shea. That's a 64-win season if our enemies could bribe Bud Selig to make us play all our games on the road (and you know they probably could if they really tried). Obviously there's something missing from road games that is present at home games that is causing the Mets' performance to drop so dramatically when on a business trip.

I don't think it's Howard Beale. I don't think it's the airplanes. I don't think it's the breeze or the colors or even the absence of friendly, feral cats.

It's the fans. It's what Mets fans bring to Shea. It's what the most full-throated Mets fans do at Shea that apparently spurs the Mets on to greater heights.

The love…the support…the educated and instinctive rushing to the aid of the home team…

Nah, that's not it.

It's the booing. It has to be.

What is more constant at Shea Stadium than the chorus of Mets fans telling the Mets all they are doing wrong? I don't know what it says about our boys, but obviously they respond to abuse. 40-25 can't be an aberration.

With the Mets in Arizona all week, it will take some doing. With San Francisco the next stop, it will take a little more. But I know we have it in us. So let's do this together, all of us.

Inhale deeply.

Concentrate.

Get your lungs and your mind in a place where they can work in tandem and do the most good.

Ready? All right, then.

I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell…

HEY METS! YOU SUCK!

BOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!! YOU SUCK, METS!

There. Now that we've made the Mets feel at home while they're on the road, good things are sure to follow.

I already spilt more pixels than one might expect on a sacrifice fly hit by a Single-A player four years ago, but if I waxed rhapsodic about Mike Jacobs' 6/25/01 game winner, it's because that season was such a giddy ride.

The summer of 2001 was when lots of New Yorkers used to nothing but Shea and Yankee Stadium found out about the minor leagues. They got an intimate park full of touches that are standard operating procedure for the low minors but not the kind of thing you'd see in the Big Leagues — dizzy-bat races, kids running hell-for-leather around the bases as if the mascot might actually dare to catch them, scads of errors cheerfully called hits. The big leagues are a daily soap opera that will tie you by turns into knots of expectation, anxiety, wild confidence, despair, joy and anger, but even the most committed fan can't approach the New York-Penn League that way — not with players washing in and out with the organizational tide, and certainly not with the on-field product so raw. What you can do, if you've got it in you, is just relax into baseball, into the green grass and the sound of the bat and not knowing any of the players' names until 3/4 of the way through the season and the just-drafted kids actually turning to look when girls call to them and yelling like a fool when the ball goes up, because (as we've told many a pal brought to Keyspan by way of initiation) anything can happen in the New York-Penn League. It's just baseball, and just baseball is pretty neat: Pick a side, cheer like heck for 'em, and if they don't win, go to Nathan's and maybe hit the Wonder Wheel with the dark of the ocean on one side and the brilliance of the city on the other. What'd you do last night? Went to Coney Island, saw the Cyclones. It was great! Did they win? Um…yeah. Or wait, no. You know, I'm not sure. But it was a great night.

So sorry to rattle on about Single-A doings, but when I heard Jacobs had got the call, it brought all that back. Sure, Danny Garcia had been an original Cyclone, but truth be told I couldn't really remember him. I remembered Jacobs — how could you not remember the guy who won the first home game in extra innings? Back then some visiting dignitary (I'm pretty sure it was Steve Phillips, though I'm clinging determinedly to a smidgen of a doubt) noted that if things went right, we might see one or two of those players in the bigs someday. I found that depressing even though I knew it was just realism. But then four years later it's someday, and one of those players turns out to be the guy who sent 'em home happy on that first night. Seeing him hanging on the dugout railing made me happy in a way far beyond the happiness of having a new member of the family to go record for posterity, get a card of and all the other geeky things I do. It made me happy because it transferred a little bit of Keyspan from when it was new and surprising and perfect to Shea, where I follow things far more avidly but also far more critically. There are bad nights a-plenty at Shea — which isn't a shot at the Mets, just an acknowledgment that that's the nature of the big-league beast — but few bad nights at Keyspan. (As long as the fricking mascot isn't being mean to my kid.)

We headed out for Keyspan this afternoon with friends who'd come up from Philadelphia; David Wright struck out just as we passed Nathan's and I began my usual freakout about parking. I fumed for a while amidst the kiddie rides — Has Cliff ever looked worse during an at-bat? Is Ramon Castro going to play until he expires? What was wrong with Benson? What the heck happened to Victor's ability to play the outfield? — but then the game started and guys from Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge rode tricycles on the field and passing Aberdeen Ironbirds actually slapped hands with the little kids along the left-field line and Joshua and Ellis and Tyson gobbled down hot dogs and chicken and fries and ice cream and there was Mookie in the third-base box and I looked around and thought, “Man, I love this place.”

And so Benson and Floyd and Victor and all of today's disappointment retreated — still there, but at a decent remove — and what was left was Mike Jacobs, who went from trying to catch his breath in the batter's box to mashing one into our bullpen (Hey, cool! He'll get the ball!) before you could say “Tricia's from Ditmas Park, and IT'S HER BIRTHDAY!” After the inning I grabbed the TiVo remote and bi-doop-bi-doop-bi-dooped my way back so I could watch Jacobs levitate around the bases again, then one more time because I'd enjoyed it so much the second time. So that was nine runs that I saw, meaning we won, what, 10-7? Why all the long faces?

Oh, and with Joshua clapping and chanting “Let's go Cyclomes!” (close enough), Brooklyn came back from a 3-0 deficit with a four-run 7th, promptly gave up three more runs, then came back with a five-run 8th for a 9-6 win. Home runs from Jonel Pacheco and Caleb Stewart, doubles from Drew Butera and Mo Chavez. (By the way, Brooklyn's two games out of the wild card.) I looked up those four Cyclones names; all that really mattered was they were the guys in red and white.

Went to Coney Island. Saw the Cyclones. Had Nathan's. Rode the Wonder Wheel. It was a great night.

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.