I don't know another place like Shea Stadium in 2006.
I don't know anywhere else where I get to inject myself into my favorite pastime as it gets better and better.
I don't know anywhere else where most everybody else wants to happen what I want to happen…and it usually happens.
I don't know anywhere else where I can sit with one great friend for hours and discuss the thing we like most, then excuse myself for a bit to find some other great friends for quick chats on what we like most.
Me and my friends, wherever they're sitting, are into the same thing. And that thing is going very well of late.
I enter Shea Stadium in 2006 excited and I leave it ecstatic.
My team is there and my friends are there and neither of them ever seem to let me down.
You just wait to be in this zone and now that I'm firmly entrenched in it, it's every bit as special as you might imagine it would be.
Someday, sooner than we can fathom, they will pave William A. Shea Municipal Stadium and put up a parking lot.
So do me this favor:
Don't let it be forgot that once there was a spot for one brief shining moment that was known as…
…Camelot?
Yes, right there at the corner of 126th and Roosevelt.
Shea what you will about the often absurd edifice that is mandated to disappear in the blink of an eye. With the team that bats last winning every night, with a quarter of a million fans floating through its gates in the course of a week and with a pure energy rising relentlessly higher than the flags above the upper deck, I gotta believe that our green, green grass of home is the most beautiful sight these eyes will ever see.
Shea Stadium in 2006. It is Camelot, I swear it is.
I'm happy. I'm having a ball.
Watching my team win frequently on TV is pretty awesome, but being inside those three blue walls to bear witness to it is something else altogether. The only thing missing from this sensational season for me until the beginning of this month was the synchronization of my presence and the Mets' success. When they lost eight of the first eleven games I attended, I really began to wonder whether they were allergic to me.
I've stopped thinking in those terms. I've been to four of the last ten Mets games at Shea Stadium, including last night's [1], and the Mets have won all four. They've won the other six, too. Perhaps I'm incidental — mere garnish to their main course.
If that's the case, that's fine. I'm just happy to be 1/45,000th of the parsley on the plate.
So, in summary, this is what I do at every opportunity in 2006:
I go to Shea Stadium.
I see my friends there.
I see the Mets win there.
I come home.
I write about it.
My life is good.