One of Those Teams

One of the core tenets to emerge amid the MY FAVORITE SEASONS, FROM LEAST FAVORITE TO MOST FAVORITE, 1969-PRESENT countdown is that the bromide “it’s not where you start, it’s where you finish” lacks foolproofitude. Sometimes the best part of a season is the start. Sometimes it’s somewhere in the middle. Sometimes it’s in the anticipation, like when you learn about a big-name signing to fill a gaping void on the eve of the next season, though what you’d really like is some follow-through once that season gets underway. If you’re extremely lucky, it is indeed where you finish, though you may have caught on that the Mets haven’t been extremely lucky all that often in this century.

Sometimes it’s where you spend the bulk of the regular season, the end of the regular season, a good bit of the postseason, and — if your head takes you there — the succeeding offseason. Sometimes, a fan makes the most of everything good that comes his way and learns to step around the unavoidable not-so-good. The not-so-good is always going to be unavoidable, but trust me: you can map out a detour.

***13. 2006
It’s January of 2024. My wife and I are watching the NFC Championship Game, the Lions at the 49ers, actually into it rather than simply having it on in the background while we scroll away on our devices. Every year at this time, bereft of baseball for months, I care more about football than I’d have suspected the previous summer. Stephanie thinks football looks good on TV and is capable of dipping into its spectacle on any given Sunday, especially if the HD picture is enhanced with a compelling storyline. This January, we have a doozy. Like all non-gambling Americans who are ostensibly unaffiliated in this matchup, we are Lions fans for the duration. Nothing against the Niners, but how can you NOT root for the team that has NEVER been to any of the previous LVII Super Bowls when they have an honest-to-goodness opportunity to make it to Super Bowl LVIII?

The Lions roar to a 24-7 lead and we offer sincere huzzahs for their (alas temporary) good fortune. We express genuine excitment for Michiganders we’ve never met. We don’t know any longtime, hardcore Lions fans, but today we are their auxiliary cheering section. Warming to the theme of the evening, we soon find ourselves sorting through teams that have waited so, so long to win the big one. In football, this automatically means the Lions and the Browns, two venerable franchises that have been on the clock ever since the 1970 NFL-AFL merger. No Supe for Detroit, ever; they haven’t gotten even this far since January of 1992, when Stephanie and I had been married precisely nine weeks. No Supe for Cleveland, ever…unless you count the Browns that became the Ravens…which, of course, you don’t. The last Browns team to win a National Football League championshp did so when I was turning two and Stephanie was, shall we say, not quite minus-three.

They Lions and the Browns, however, are hardly alone in Roger Goodell’s antsy waiting room. The Arizona Cardinals snuck into one Super Bowl, lost it late, and have to reach back to their Chicago incarnation and 1947 for their most recent NFL championship. The Atlanta Falcons have been been in the Super Bowl twice, led one of them by 25 points, yet have nothing in the way of an ultimate reward to show for their 1966 hatching. The Jets — for whom my “I’m more of a Giants fan, but I root for them, too” affinity has been on pause after sitting through a rain-soaked intraswamp debacle at the end of October — have gone cold for 55 years. The Dolphins, whose dynasty briefly captured my youthful fancy, just passed the half-century mark without augmenting their pair of Vince Lombardi trophies and are now four decades removed from their most recent trip to the Big Game (I can’t say I mind). The Cowboys have retained their glamour but haven’t gotten near a Super Bowl since their last win there XXVIII seasons ago (no complaints here). Washington was considered a jewel franchise, but their last significant celebration came the same January the Princes were newlyweds and the Lions last peaked. The then-Skins beat the Buffalo Bills to win it all that Sunday; the Bills are their own star-crossed story. As are, with less fanfare, the Bengals. And the Chargers. And the Vikings. And whatever happened to the Raiders? Didn’t they used to be an avatar of excellence? And didn’t they used to play in California?

These “haven’t since…” or “have never” totals can sneak up on fans and impartial observers alike. They can also disappear in a flash. Chiefs fans waited 50 years to re-enter the Kingdom of champions. Taylor Swift issues aside, when was the last time you conjured deep empathy for their cause? Hell, the Patriots, mostly futile from their founding in 1960 until a former Montreal Expos draft pick trotted into the huddle to relieve Drew Bledsoe in 2001, once presented a sympathetic face to the sporting world.

Natch, even before the Niners rally to ruin the Lions’ bid to cement their status as America’s Adopted Team (and two weeks before San Francisco guarantees it will extend its stealth Super Bowl championship drought to three decades), the conversation in our living room shifts to baseball. I am moved to catalogue the contact buzzes I’ve allowed myself as one overlong championship dearth of 40 or more years after another fell by the wayside ater the turn of the millennium: the Angels in 2002 (Stephanie joined me on that bandwagon, purchasing a few off-brand Rally Monkeys at our neighborhood Pathmark to send the Halos good vibes), the Red Sox in 2004, the White Sox in 2005, the Giants in 2010, the Cubs in 2016, and, to a lesser extent, the Astros in 2017 (extent lessened because of what came to light regarding their methods a couple of years later) and the Rangers in 2023 (I was rooting for the Diamondbacks, but it was still cool to see loyal Arlingtonians sip from their first goblet of glory after 52 seasons of building up a thirst). All this talk got me estimating how long is too long; when a wait becomes a drought; and when your team unquestionably becomes One of Those Teams everybody knows has been on the outside looking in forever.

Like the Lions, whose last NFL championship occurred in 1957.
Like the Browns, winners of it all most recently in 1964.
Like the Jets, I suppose. I’m just old enough to vaguely recall their standing as defending Super Bowl champions, but “January 12, 1969,” serves as much as a cudgel for the cruel these days as it does a milestone for the faithful, like “1940” did for hockey’s Rangers until 1994 (which wasn’t as long as it’s been for the Jets).
Like the Indians/Guardians, whose fans had to keep suffering toward and eventually past a seventh decade in order for the burden to be lifted from the shoulders of Cubs-lovers after 108 years.

Of course this led me to the Mets and how the 17 years between 1969 and 1986 represented a personal eternity, given that I waited between the ages of 6 and 23 for the second world championship. That’s being in first grade for the first one and being out of college a year-and-a-half by the second one. Even the wait between World Series appearances, from ’73 to ’86 was endless at that stage of my existence.

Thing is, I continued, every year without a championship is one year too many, but you have to be reasonable about it. Yeah, it sucked immensely to not win again in 1987, having now had a fresh taste of the top and then been denied an immediate next helping, but that was just one year. Boo-hoo, I’ve gone nearly 365 days without a ticker-tape parade. I could have made similar rationales to myself during the near misses and close calls that followed in ’88, ’89 and ’90 had I not been so aggravated by the near misses and close calls that followed in ’88, ’89 and ’90. It wasn’t until October 27, 1991, which happened to be the night the Twins and Braves were playing Game Seven of their World Series, that I really developed an inkling that length was coming into play. It was the fifth anniversary of our Game Seven victory, the one that vaulted 1986 onto the plane it shared with 1969 and no other Mets team. The Channel 4 news showed a clip of Jesse Orosco striking out Marty Barrett to commemorate the milestone. I was already aware of what date it was and what had happened five years ago tonight and what hadn’t happened since. Now it was This Date In History. For the first time since October 27, 1986, that world championship plane of ours was beginning to feel overly underoccupied.

I drifted from the Lions and Niners in front of us and heard myself reflecting aloud. I got older, I told Stephanie, and I waited for the Mets to make it back to the World Series. That took until 2000. Fourteen years, a pretty arid dry spell, I said. Stephanie nodded. She was there. She remembered. It was great to get where we got, but we didn’t win what there was to win, and the wait just kept getting longer. We passed 2003 emptyhanded, I added, noting that meant we would mathematically exceed those 17 years that spanned ’69 to ’86, and the next time we got to the World Series, in 2015 (also great), it was nearly 30 years — and when we didn’t win that one, it grew to exactly 30 years. It’s only grown longer since then.

The time I really thought we’d get it done, though, the time I decided was going to be perfect to get it done, I Metsplained to my wife (for not the first time, but she’s a good audience for reruns), the wait had already been long, but not as long as it would become. Not necessarily too long — not if it was going to come to an abrupt end, which I really and truly believed it would. The wait, at that point, was a 20-year wait. I was very ready for it to end after 20 years. So very ready. It should have. Twenty years was long enough.

But it didn’t end that year. It just kept going. It’s still going.

I started to detail why it should have happened for us that season and postseason, but I couldn’t quite get more than few words out without something get caught in my throat and something else welling up in my eyes. Stephanie understood. She was there then, too; she’s been with me a lot of seasons. I went silent for a moment, as if listening to the football play-by-play demanded my utmost attention. At last, I steered the subject into the long-term parking garage.

“Anyway, you don’t want to be One of Those Teams.”

Had the New York Mets won the World Series in 2006 and not again as of the Spring of 2024, it would be too long. Definitely too long. Longer than 1969 to 1986. But it wouldn’t be nearly as long as it is now, and the thought of the Mets being One of Those Teams wouldn’t have crossed my mind during the most recent NFC Championship Game or any time. That topic would be fodder for the Guardians fans (76 years since their last world championship in 1948) and the Pirates fans (45 years since 1979) and the Orioles and Tigers fans (41 and 40 years since 1983 and 1984, respectively) and the thus far altogether unrewarded followers of the Padres (born 1969), Brewers (relocated from Seattle 1970), Mariners (replacing the Pilots in 1977), Rockies (expansion class of 1993) and Rays (close but no cigar twice since swimming into being in 1998) AND it would be for the fans of any ballclub whose last World Series title came anywhere between 1987 and 2005. Our 18-year dry spell wouldn’t speak well for us in 2024, but at least we wouldn’t be wandering through the desert twice as long as we have been since 1986.

And who knows? We win in 2006, maybe we get the hang of it for 2007 and/or 2008. Maybe we stay on a perennial pennant path and don’t recede for eras at a time. Maybe we become One of Those Teams in a totally different sense of the phrase.

But we didn’t. We could have. We should have. We didn’t.

It’s 38 years and counting.

Of every Met year to have transpired after 1986, I’ve been absolutely convinced during only one of them that the Mets of the moment were on the verge of achieving their third world championship. In 2006, I knew as much as fan could think he knows it that THIS would be our year. Maybe not before it started, but before April was over I sensed strongly that we had a real shot. There were moments in May when we/I had to negotiate a pocket of uncertainty, but we/I made it through the month without a fatal stumble, and faster than you might say “hey, did you see where Pat Mahomes’s kid plays quarterback for Kansas City?” we took off and we never looked back. The divisional race was over by the middle of June, with us at the front of it, coasting in the direction of October, now and then revving our motor to demonstrate to any doubters we were capable of doing whatever it took to win whatever there was to win.

I LOVED living in the heart of 2006. We won on Opening Day (helped by the lack of video replay review on a play at the plate; go tell it to a time machine), lost our second game in irritating fashion (perhaps the gods’ way of imbuing us with humility) and won our third game to take sole possession of first place. It was an item we held for the rest of the year. The Braves, who’d bullied us since suddenly remembering they played in the eastern half of the United States, had at last crumbled. We were five games ahead of them after the twelfth game of the season, and they were done. The Phillies, who annually boasted talent but lacked cohesiveness, could never quite get their act together. They had crept as close to 3½ games behind us as of June 7. By the afternoon we finished a three-game visit to Citizens Bank Park on June 15, we led them, our closest competitors, by 9½. Soon our margin over the pack was double-digits and it never slipped into singles.

For the first time since we’d pulled away from the Pirates in August of 1988, I knew — I mean knew — we were going to win our division. The 2006 Mets were NL East champs-in-waiting for more than half a season. The Wild Card, our treasured prize in 1999 and 2000, was for the rabble to fuss over. We’d effectively clinched first place.

All at once, we were larger than life. It was such a step up from 2005 that I might have asked myself if this wasn’t all happening too soon (especially given that it was the second year of our blog, when I tended to pinch myself that we got to write about this kind of joyride), but then I’d remember twenty years was hardly too soon. So I got back to taking in all our enormity and reveling in it nonstop. Five Mets graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. Six Mets populated the National League All-Stars. Our new television network was a cable TV sensation. Our new ballpark was putting down stakes in Shea’s parking lot. Our Team, Our Time, as our goofy yet zeitgeisty attempt at an anthem put it. When the 1986 Mets swung by Shea in August to celebrate their china anniversary, they could have been forgiven for doing a double-take if they thought they were glimpsing a version of their younger selves. We were in the midst of a seven-game winning streak. We were nursing a 14-game lead. We were days away from swatting dramatic home runs to unnerve the Cardinals. By the end of the month, we’d have the best record in baseball.

Baseball Like It Oughta Be. Again.

Jose Reyes and David Wright had blossomed into the superstardom that had been projected for them. Paul Lo Duca (Captain Red Ass, per SI) made us more or less forget Mike Piazza was still active and playing for somebody else. Carlos Beltran shook off his first-year New York tentativeness and put up MVP numbers. Carlos Delgado represented more of a good Carlos thing; between them, Belgado stroked 79 homers and drove in 230 runs. ¡Dos Carloses son mejores quen uno! Nobody saw Jose Valentin coming, yet he was hitting home runs regularly and filling the gap that had yawned at second base. Dos Joses, tambien. Nobody saw Endy Chavez coming, yet the erstwhile Met-killer (and before that Met farmhand) arrived to fill in all over the outifeld with defensive aplomb and timely hititng. Ancient Julio Franco revived as a pinch-hitter and team leader. Lastings Milledge showed a sample of his first-round stuff.

Were there reasons to worry? There are always reasons to worry. Fandom without worry is just wearing t-shirts that have a logo you like. The Cliff Floyd of 2006 wasn’t the Cliff Floyd of 2005, but there were definitely some big hits residing in his bat. He’d be fine. A taxi accident in Miami injured Duaner Sanchez and undermined the strength of our bullpen, motivating Omar Minaya to trade dependable right fielder Xavier Nady for relief depth, but we had a lot of arms out there, plus experienced hitter (and the most accomplished Jewish slugger since Hank Greenberg) Shawn Green on the way to replace ex-Met X-Man. We’d be fine. The starting pitching could be creaky at times, but among Pedro, Gl@v!ne, Trachsel, El Duque and whoever was the fifth starter in whichever week it was, it wasn’t like Willie Randolph couldn’t rely on guile and pedigree, along with blips of promise from younger fellows. We’d be fine.

You get through August with so much fine, you begin to feel invincible. We entered September with the best record in baseball. We were the first team to clinch — actually clinch — a division title. We nailed home-field advantage for the NL playoffs. What could stop us?

Pedro Martinez’s health had taken a turn for the worse. Between a bad calf and a worse rotator cuff, Pedro would be out for the postseason. That wasn’t good, but if we were being honest, though Pedro had made the All-Star team and had given us a robust push from April to June — and contributed to an extraordinarily satisfying burial of the Braves in July — we’d done a lot of what we’d done without him available. We could get by without Pedro if we absolutely had to.

Then there was something about El Duque’s calf acting up just before we were to play L.A. in the Division Series, and that was even less good, because El Duque had been so ageless and had picked up so much slack for the rotation when it looked wobbly. He was also a legendary postseason presence. Oof. But this is why we had more than a couple of pitchers. This is why John Maine had been readied. Maine started Game One of the NLDS and acquitted himself sufficiently (4.1 IP, 1 ER). So did Delgado (4-for-5, with a homer and two ribbies) and Floyd (a dinger of his own). And, oh, a defensive play for the ages, when three ex-Dodgers — Green in right, Valentin at second, Lo Duca at home — combined to retire two current Dodgers (Jeff Kent and Russell Martin) on the same play on consecutive tags at the plate. Shea Stadium, to my trained ears, had never been so loud, nor had it quaked so much. They may have had to have repounded those new-ballpark stakes in the parking lot after the way the old joint shook on 9-4-2 squared.

Gl@v!ne, who’d grown downright dependable in his fourth Met season, took care of L.A. in the second game. We flew west and finished off the sweep (our first in a postseason since ’69), with the offense abusing Greg Maddux, and Billy Wagner nailing the last out. Maddux and Gl@v!ne weren’t Braves? Wagner wasn’t an Astro? Me from the late ’90s would have had a hard time with the scorecards, but this was 2006, and everything was going as it was supposed to. We were moving on to the League Championship Series…the only New York team going so far, I don’t mind pointing out.

We took Game One of the NLCS from the Cardinals. Beltran socked a two-run homer, and the rest was handled by the capable arms of Gl@v!ne for seven, Guillermo Mota (an old Piazza nemesis we decided to tolerate for a spell) in the eighth and Wagner in the ninth. We’d now won four consecutive playoff games, on top of the final four during the regular season. Word was El Duque would be ready for the World Series, which was only three wins away. The October before, when the White Sox set fire to their 88-year drought, they lost only once en route to the title. Impressive, but not as impressive as were being. As I joined a mob chanting “LET’S GO METS” when we weren’t singing “HoZAY! HoZAY HoZAY HoZAY!!! HoZAY! HoZAY!” en route to Game Two from the LIRR’s Shea Stadium stop, I dared to think — and it didn’t seem like much of a dare — “we’re gonna go eleven-and-oh.”

I’d always been too superstitious to be so bold, but this team was rolling. The Cardinals drifted into the postseason with an 83-78 record. They had Albert Pujols, sure, but there was otherwise little about them that suggested destiny was propelling them. In the AL, the Tigers (who had been kind enough to have taken out the Yankees in the first round) were in the process of sweeping the A’s. We were already outclassing St. Louis. Detroit? Whatever. Twenty years had been enough in this part of New York. Two-Thousand Six was ours.

What could stop us?

Maybe my hubris? Maybe Floyd going out of the lineup with his achilles bothering him? Randolph could have but didn’t shelve him before the NLCS began. Maybe our thinner than I cared to admit starting pitching? Maine wasn’t as adequate in Game Two against the Cardinals as he’d been the week before, letting an immediate 3-0 lead melt into a 4-4 tie. Maybe our well-worn bullpen? Neither Mota nor Wagner came through when it mattered most. Maybe our right field defense? Green in October sure looked a lot older than Nady had in the heady days of April. Maybe the Cardinals and whatever destiny the likes of So Taguchi (go-ahead homer) and Scott Spiezio (a torch of a triple in the eighth, a dagger of a double in the ninth) had packed? We lost the second game, 9-6, and the series was tied at one. So much for visions of 11-0.

Game Three in St. Louis was Steve Trachsel lasting one and Jeff Suppan lasting eight; we lost, 5-0, and trailed in the NLCS. We hadn’t trailed in any kind of standings since the second game of the season. We had 160 games to make up for it then. We basically had Game Four to reconvene our poise pronto. Our starter was Oliver Perez, one of the pieces moved Queensward in the post-Sanchez panic of the trade deadline. Perez was what was known as a project. Pittsburgh, which could have used all the help it could get, didn’t have the patience for him and packaged him along with Roberto Hernandez in the Nady swap. The Mets didn’t have to use him much down the stretch. He did throw a shutout in September, but even with Pedro and El Duque out, nobody was particularly counting on Ollie for October.

Now we had to count on Ollie. Ollie, in turn, counted on the Met offense, which withstood the Cardinals’ contingency starter, Anthony Reyes (ERA over 5), and then strafed three relievers. Perez carried an 11-3 lead into the sixth, and we breezed to an 11-5 finish in Game Four. Game Five would be future Hall of Famer Gl@v!ne versus historically shaky Jeff Weaver. T#m does what T#m’s been doing, and we keep hitting like we hit in support of Ollie, and “fine” returns to the forefront of Met fortunes.

But that didn’t happen. Weaver lasted longer than Gl@v!ne and gave up fewer runs. There was no particular salvation to be found in the bullpen portion of Game Five, either. The Mets, who’d scored at least six runs in four of their previous seven postseason contests, lost, 4-2. Our pitching was nothing special. Our hitting was inconsistent. Our fielding was hardly airtight. We were one game from elimination.

Then, back at Shea, everything exceeds fine for eight innings. Jose acknowledges all the HoZAYing by leading off with a homer versus Chris Carpenter. Green drives in a run, Lo Duca knocks home two, Maine and three relievers scatter baserunners and Wagner gets the ball for the ninth. It’s not a save situation, except for our season needing to be saved. Just three outs without four runs, Billy. Let’s go.

Billy, in the best tradition of those Met closers you kept telling yourself were really, really good despite your bones knowing the Met closer was never as good as you wished, put two on, got two out, then gave up a two-run double. Finally, a third out sealed it, 4-2. I stood in front of my seat throughout the top of the ninth. I fell into my seat when it was over.

Hubris was gone. Stayin’ alive was where it was at. The series was knotted at three.

My stomach might have been knotted, too.

I’d been in a splendid postseason groove in terms of passing through the gates of Valhalla, a.k.a. Shea. The Mets had played five home games thus far, and I was there for all of them. That wouldn’t be the case for Game Seven. This left me churning all day October 19 and not knowing what to do with myself once Perez threw the first pitch on TV. Sit? Stand? Wander in a small circle? I did it all, constantly. For a change, it was my cats not understanding my irrational movements.

It was 1-1 in the top of the sixth. I can tell you how it got that way, but it doesn’t matter. Ollie was pitching the game of his life and our lives, which was a blessing. Suppan was at least as effective, which was a problem. We weren’t looking for villains. With Jim Edmonds on second with one out and Scott Rolen up, we were holding out for a hero.

We got one — right, Gary Cohen?

Perez deals.

Fastball hit in the air to left field, that’s deep.

Back goes Chavez, back near the wall…leaping…and…

HE MADE THE CATCH!

HE TOOK A HOME RUN AWAY FROM ROLEN!

Trying to get back to first Edmonds…

HE’S DOUBLED OFF!

AND THE INNING IS OVER!

ENDY CHAVEZ SAVED THE DAY!

He reached high over the left field wall, right in front of the visitors’ bullpen and pulled back a two-run homer.

He went to the apex of his leap and caught it in the webbing of his glove with his elbow up above the fence, a MIRACULOUS play by Endy Chavez, and then Edmonds is doubled off first and Oliver Perez escapes the sixth inning.

The play of the year, the play, maybe, of the franchise history for Endy Chavez, the inning is over.

The apex of his leap. The apex of our year. The apex, maybe, of the franchise history. For a moment, nothing from 1962 forward felt bigger. We were living in it right here and now. No Met was ever more heroic on a baseball field, certainly in front of the left field wall at Shea Stadium, than Endy Chavez.

It was still 1-1.

My confidence soared. Then it plummeted. Up. Down. Standing. Sitting. Pacing. Shrieking. Silent. Probably yowling. Irking the kitties. I zipped back and forth for the next three-and-a-half innings between IT’S MEANT TO BE and WE’RE SCREWED, depending on what happened with each pitch, each swing, each take. WE’RE SCREWED took the pennant in seven games.

I’ve never made it from the beginning to the end of Staying Alive, the ill-conceived 1983 sequel to Saturday Night Fever, but I have managed to catch the coda to the movie’s climax, in which John Travolta as Tony Manero, now a Broadway dancer, asks his girlfriend, “Do you know what I wanna do? You know what I wanna do?”

“What?” she queries helpfully.

“Strut.”

And he hits the streets to the strains of the Bee Gees like he did back in 1977, when he was the king of the disco.

In the fall of 2006, once I compartmentalized my immediate heartbreak, you could tell by the way I used my walk that my team had executed a monumentally wonderful regular season-plus and had us on the brink of even more. Privately, I moped and mourned. To the outside world, I strutted around like I had in the fall of 1986. I wore my Mets jacket whenever feasible and stuck my chest out and used every bit of body language at my disposal to tell passersby that I was a self-appointed ambassador for the best damn baseball team in New York this year and you just watch what we’re gonna do next year. We weren’t world champions, but we might as well have been.

More than a runner-up. More than a runner-up to me.

I really believed the front I was putting on. Give our team a little more time. This 2006 season will prove only the beginning of Met things to come. We’re gonna move on from Game Seven. We’re gonna withstand Suppan shutting us down in the sixth (with the bases loaded) and the seventh, and lefty Randy Flores doing the same to us in the eighth. We’re gonna get over Aaron Heilman giving up a two-run homer to Yadier Molina in the top of the ninth and the Cardinals shushing Shea, 3-1. We’re gonna render to a textured footnote the entire bottom of the ninth.

The leadoff single from Valentin.

The single right behind him from Chavez.

Floyd hobbling to the plate only to strike out.

Edmonds robbing Reyes of a sinking-liner base hit that would have at least loaded the bases and likely scored Valentin from second (Edmonds’s thievery was not as dramatic as Chavez’s, but game is impelled to reluctantly recognize game).

Lo Duca walking to load the bases with two out, Anderson Hernandez pinch-running for the catcher whose walkup music happened to be Stayin’ Alive.

Rookie closer Adam Wainwright (in this role only because Old Friend™ Jason Isringhausen was sidelined with an aching hip) reinventing the curveball on the fly.

Carlos Beltran — who had detonated a walkoff bomb at Izzy’s expense in August — being perhaps a touch too selective on oh-and-two with two out (though you try hitting that curve).

All that? It was gonna serve as prologue for the real story, the multiple happy endings still to come for the post-2006 Mets. We lost a game and a series and a chance to go all the way ASAP, but we didn’t lose our future.

Reyes. Wright. The Carloses. The dazzling horizon. The whole thing was still right there in front of us. If I believed otherwise, would I be wearing this jacket with such conviction?

By the way, when I say I wore my Mets jacket, of course I had more than one. I had been hoping to add another to my wardrobe before 2007 arrived. At the last regular-season home game of 2006, when everything that could have been clinched had already been clinched and the postseason beckoned with so much promise, I saw somebody a few rows ahead of me wearing a varsity-style jacket commemorating on its back two world championships with two patches: one for 1969 and one for 1986. My companion that evening remarked it was quite an attractive jacket. Yeah, I said, but I wanna wait to get the revised version, the one with the third patch. I’m sure I wouldn’t have been the only one lining up to grab that jacket.

We’re still waiting.

PREVIOUS ‘MY FAVORITE SEASONS’ INSTALLMENTS
Nos. 55-44: Lousy Seasons, Redeeming Features
Nos. 43-34: Lookin’ for the Lights (That Silver Lining)
Nos. 33-23: In the Middling Years
Nos. 22-21: Affection in Anonymity
No. 20: No Shirt, Sherlock
No. 19: Not So Heavy Next Time
No. 18: Honorably Discharged
No. 17: Taken Down in Paradise City
No. 16: Thin Degree of Separation
No. 15: We Good?
No. 14: This Thing Is On