I've known two people who told me they had an older relative tell them, “Hate is for Hitler.” In other words, don't throw that particular four-letter word around so much. Show some perspective. Keep your feelings from getting ugly. That's very sound, very wise advice.

Unless of course you're a Mets fan.

One of our coolest blolleagues is Metsradamus, a seer of all things who saw this would be a good week to take off. But Metsradamus did not leave us hanging. In fact, he left us hating. Go check out his ballot for the 2005 Hall of Hate. Mind you, this is only the latest bunch of bastards on his/our dance card. The comments section explains who's already in.

I hope it's not too late to write in Antonio Perez.

Well, that was a bracing slap in the face, wasn't it?

Antonio Perez. Swear to god I pegged him early in the afternoon as the eventual culprit. How? Just pick the guy I've never heard of and assume he'll ruin things for the future Hall of Famer.

Now that he's a fully accredited graduate of Jimmy Qualls Senior High, there's the matter of the game. Who hit the home run that followed the triple? I actually don't remember anymore and it was only a few minutes ago. Jayson Werth, Gary just said. OK, Jayson Werth. Familiar name. Doesn't make it any better.

Then there's the matter of not scoring behind Pedro Martinez. Brad Penny? The “Bad Penny” from “suck on this for Shinjo” night? The guy who never beats us, allegedly? He chooses today? I hate the Dodgers, I swear I do.

We really could've used this game. Houston goes to the trouble of losing to Pittsburgh again. It would've been so sweet, even if it was just a win, never mind a (go ahead, say it) no-hitter. What a nice, nice way of ending the trip and helping to forget if not heal the wounds inflicted on Mike Cameron and Carlos Beltran.

I did what I could. I sat in my home office where I started the game. I busied myself with whatever I could find to do. I kept the radio on and only peeked at the TV after each out. I had no problem with Gary and Eddie reporting history but I felt a tectonic plate of fate shift when Gary mentioned Howie was off for the weekend and “think he's not sitting on the edge of his seat?” Oh Gary, how could you? Howie's the one who uncovered the King Korn Kurse years ago on Mets Extra, something about the 50,000 trading stamps the supermarket sponsor promised in 1962 to any Mets pitcher who threw a no-no and how that served to keep all Mets pitchers from joining the ranks of the hitless, apparently for all of eternity. Obviously Howie is a karrier of the kurse.

One run. We had nine hits but one run when Antonio Perez, whoever he is (oh yeah, he's the guy who broke up what was going to be the first no-hitter in Mets history), stepped up in the eighth. We've really got to give Pedro some cushion for these outings.

I was going to take a shower earlier. But I remembered that 30 years ago Randy Tate lost a no-hitter to Jim Lyttle and the Expos as I was getting into the tub. So I decided to sweat it out. I guess I can go hit the showers now.

I guess we all can.

Double damn.

Damn.

I'll admit it: Didn't see a single pitch of Jae Seo's latest glorious outing. (Gerald Williams?! Really?!) We were claimed by the social ramble, which Satchel long ago warned ain't restful. And as I retype this multiple times with only one eye able to open (please excuse any and all typos), I assure you it ain't.

Besides the fact that it's always exceedingly strange to come up cold and see the simple recitation of a ballgame, stripped of all the anxiety and parallel universes and what-ifs, this reminds me of one of the oldest fan hypotheticals: If your team could win the World Series, but you weren't allowed to watch a single game of the season, would you take it?

If you say no, isn't that awfully self-centered? Presumably the team will live on after you've sloughed off this mortal coil, so are you saying you don't care if they go 0-for-the-rest-of-eternity? Are you really so important? Don't you wish them well whether your butt's on the couch or not?

But if you say yes, isn't that horribly bloodless? Aren't you just in love with numbers? What, exactly, celebrates you from the average Yankee fan?

One game doesn't make this argument — one game is like missing one of those small chapters in a 19th-century novel. Eliza visited the vicar, decided his advice was worthless, and returned home to find her youngest sister had become smitten with an officer. You'll probably find out all that again in the next chapter anyway, just as the prelude to Pedro's telecast will include Jae Seo persevering, Castro and Williams coming through and the Mets understandably shying from collisions.

But that said, the larger thought experiment stands, as you and I have argued before. As I recall (I trust your memory will be better), when confronted with this hypothetical you looked in rapid succession amused and wary and concerned, and then asked: “Could I watch the season-highlights video?” To which I replied no — you could never glean any more context than offered on random SportsCenter clips and from the written word. No highlight videos, no ESPN Classic, no cast of characters, no ebb and flow of the season.

My vote is no — it's not worth it. I've got to watch — not every game, witness tonight, but enough of them so the season can become a story, full of heroes and villains and plot twists and a conclusion in the first days of October or (God willing) weeks later. We fans may not be good enough to play or close enough to the clubhouse to understand the psychological work of keeping a team on the beam, but we're part of this family nonetheless, and without us it's a hollow affair. We're the ones cheering when things go right and booing when things go wrong and even (in the case of Shea) booing when we've decided someone's in for a licking, justified or un-. Fans can lift you up and bring you down, be smart and infuriatingly obtuse, but without us it's 50 rich guys playing in an empty park, and no title means anything.

That said, I'll do my best to be on-station tomorrow. A 3-3 road trip — and this whole crazy season, observed or not — remains within our grasp. What that means, I don't know. But it's part of this story, however it ends up being writ. So I'll be there. It's all I can do, but it's not nothing.

Gerald Williams? Homering? Doubling? Stealing third? Scoring an insurance run? Leading the way to victory?

C'est la vie, say the old folks. It goes to show you never can tell.

Now if Pedro Martinez can pitch like Jae Seo and Mike Piazza can hit like Ramon Castro, we could be getting somewhere.

Go back to sleep. Nothing to see here.

This is the West Coast game I remember, the one whose inevitable return I've been dreading for more than four months. It's the one that ends with Roger McDowell balking somebody home or Dave Telgheder giving way to Doug Linton giving way to utter dismay. (Brian Bohanon and Barry Manuel also work in this equation.) I knew it was coming sooner or later. Yeah, the last game in San Diego was horrible, but that was a different kind of horrible. This was standard-issue Chavez Rotten. It's part of the package. You don't want it but you have to accept it. It's an integral component of nearly every Mets season.

Think of the Dodger Do-In as a rite of passage.

Since you tuned out and turned in, let me fill you in on what you missed:

Total fucking bullshit is what you missed. Do the details really fucking matter? Just know that it started late, it went long, it wound up in a walk-off, it revolved around somebody nobody ever heard of flinging his batting helmet in jubilation like he's David Ortiz (which he may as well have been) and it probably finished, for the eighth or ninth time, our chances to advance this season.

Friday night's/Saturday morning's game sustained itself far enough for the keen-eared listener to understand just how obviously in the offing the loss was. Gary and Eddie (great guy, wonderful guy…announcing's just not his strong suit) kept going on about how endless the game was and how it was going to lap the Saturday afternoon start, ha-ha. When Eddie made that point one too many times, I could feel a Dioner Navarro home run off Braden Looper in my bones. Actually, I could sense something like that coming when the guys insisted the Mets couldn't win until Cam came out from under anesthesia. Nice thought, but don't say shit like that. It never, ever leads to any good.

As for the rest of the series, Jae Seo is scheduled to come back to Earth later today and the Mets will attempt to win a game started by Pedro Martinez for the first time in more than three weeks on Sunday. We figure to have a short bench and an interminable flight home.

Sweet fucking dreams. I hate L.A.

Apologies all around. I'm not going to make the end of this one.

I sincerely hope this link will magically become a happy recap, but what I did see would definitely count as an ughfest. An outside observer might think Victor Zambrano got jobbed by getting stuck with those runs pinned on his resume by Heilman, but it was one of those outings where the unfairness turns out to be perfectly fair. Victor started the night with his mechanics totally out of whack (I liked the shot of Pedro doing pitching coaching by semaphore), did the Bad Victor thing of pitching away from contact, thereby neutralizing Good Victor's movement on his pitches (Milton Bradley in the 5th was particularly infuriating, despite winding up OK), somehow turned in a glittering sixth, then paid the price for those extra pitches and making himself work too hard with those out-of-gas walks to start the 7th. Heilman, well, early ughs (why did the infield appear to be playing in on Robles' single?) and then some awfully good pitching a bit late. Roberto immediately finds his flesh in the way of another comebacker, then somehow gets out of it despite being so out of sync with Piazza before that pitch that he shrugged.

On the flipside, well, Bad Victor was lucky enough to draw Worse Weaver. Welcome back Victor Diaz, all hail David Wright, and curse the fact that Marlon Anderson's little liner was about an inch from being a very silly 93-foot RBI. Though we should have been docked a run for the mere appearance of Ice Williams in the starting lineup.

And were they actually playing Wagner? In L.A.? If there's a place where Wagner makes less sense than Los Angeles, I'd like to know about it. I'm surprised it even made a sound.

And now Padilla gets rescued by a great play by Jose Offerman, of all people, so we promptly celebrate by wasting a leadoff single. I give up. I can't remember the last time I woke up and had to check whether we won or lost, but tomorrow morning will be the next time.

I had business north of the city Thursday afternoon. By the time it wrapped up, the Mets and Padres were already in the fourth, the inning when Beltran walked, stole second and, thanks to Robert Fick forgetting to lower his shades on a foul pop into the Petco sun, got driven in by Cliff Floyd. It made for good listening as I wound my way to the Metro-North station and then, once on a 4:51, back to Grand Central.

We were in the tunnel for the final leg of the train trip when I heard David Ross send a liner sinking into shallow right-center. Howie said of Beltran and Cameron “they dive” and “they collide” — verse as play-by-play — and that the ball wasn't caught. I could tell by his the tone of his voice that it was a lot worse than that but by then we were so deep into the tunnel that I lost WFAN. Obviously whatever the aftermath of the interaction was, it wasn't good.

Usually I would shuttle from Grand Central to Times Square and then go one stop to Penn, but given that I was left hanging by lack of reception, I opted to trot outside and determine just what had happened to our guys. Maybe I'd get an update and then head back down to the subway. The first thing I heard when I tuned back in was, “Our prayers go out to Mike Cameron.”

With that, I decided to walk through the humidity. Five blocks west, eight blocks south — not a big deal but it felt vital. It felt like I needed to be there with my team, with my centerfielder, with my rightfielder. They weren't going to magically heal just because my ears were directed their way, yet I had to be with them somehow.

After 9/11, I remember berating myself for the manner in which I took Mets' injuries so seriously and didn't worry nearly as much about the health of the people I'm related to by blood. I had the feeling after that week that I would never take baseball so life-and-death again. You know how that went and I think we'd both agree that to some extent that it's better to live a little for what we love. Still, I don't know what to make of my reaction today. Our announcers described it in such chilling terms, as the worst collision they ever saw, and that would have to include Mookie-Lenny, Blocker-Heep, Theodore-Hahn. Those were bad. This was worse?

As I walked to Penn Station, I couldn't decide if the game mattered anymore. Not in the ur-sense that I pondered in September 2001 but this game in particular. How could I even think of something as Philistine as a win when two human beings were hurt, potentially very hurt? On the other hand, they got hurt trying to attain victory. That's what they do. And I was worried about them, all humanitarian impulses aside, because they were trying to attain victory. That's what I do.

Joe Randa did what Joe Randa does and put his team ahead of my team. Damn, I guess. Padres 2 Mets 1. This wasn't healing our fallen fielders either, so why not win? Yeah, why not? When the Mets came to bat in the top of the eighth and Reyes led off with a four-pitch walk, I sensed something might happen, something just.

What do I mean just? It wasn't a beanball or a brawl that took out two-thirds of our outfield. It was just a watermain of happenstance tapped into by the hustle & flow of the game, and when it broke, it was freakishly bad luck that gushed forth. Two millionaires racing hellbent for one ball…funny, if both of them had pulled up and the ball fell in, chances are we'd be poking the offending parties with a stick, branding them nonchalant so-and-so's who don't respect the sport that made them wealthy. But if they'd done that, Ross would've been held to a single and Beltran and Cameron would be in the lineup in Los Angeles. Discretion, the better part of valor and a pair of healthy flycatchers are all the rewards of 20/20 hindsight.

Reyes stole second. Offerman struck out. Then Floyd stepped up. Would he also Step Up? Of course. He's Floyd. The Man. The Last Outfielder Standing. Cliff Floyd, who spoke truth to power almost a year ago when he said, quite correctly, that there was no light at the end of the tunnel; Cliff Floyd, who this year has been lighting candles and preventing darkness. Surely Cliff would do something just.

Instead he gets hit by that pitcher with the weird transfer between his glove and his hand…Otsuka, that's him. I've had it in for him since last year (I have it in for all pitchers I've never heard of who baffle us; I have it in for a lot of pitchers). And who's the home plate ump? Our old pal Eric Cooper, he of the antennae so sensitive he could pick up an AM broadcast in Grand Central Station. Hence, the whole thing has descended from morality play to farce. I keep walking but there's not a damn thing I can do for them. Cliff drags himself to first and gives way to David Wright who, until the seventh, had been in on the most memorable defensive episode of this series. Surely, David will wreak revenge on…the Padres? The fates? I didn't know who to blame.

Wright rapped into a 6-4-3 double play. Nobody came through. The Mets were done for the eighth, the game and, though it can't be told for certain, their longshot playoff chances suddenly sounded more shot than long. I didn't get a final until I was on the 6:10 out of Penn. Word was Beltran didn't remember what happened though he was deemed generally OK. Cameron was less so but the damage wasn't as horrible as it looked like it might be.

A pretty decent substitute for victory, no?