The makeup doubleheader begins at 4:10, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms at 5:40, filling the late afternoon and the early evening, and then as soon as Manny Acosta comes in, it stops and leaves you to face the nightcap alone.
You counted on it, relied on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of a transient 7-6 lead alive, and then just when the opener is all defeat [1], when you need it to go away most, it drags interminably into a second game.
Last night, September 29, a Wednesday before a Thursday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it just went on and on and on. Then it stopped, and our chances of finishing with a winning record were gone [2].
The 2010 Mets leave you numb. They were designed to leave you numb.
(Apologies to A. Bartlett Giamatti [3], though I doubt he’d have been so elegiac had he spent nearly seven hours paying attention to this particular team on this particular day.)