Now Leaving the Montage

And yet, it felt fantastical. I wasn’t entirely sure the road I walked was even there anymore. And even if it were there as the map said, and even if I went to walk it again on another day, another season, maybe in a different pair of shoes, it wouldn’t be the same road. I had found a proper seam at the start of that one spring and had slipped into it. The road I walked was there on that one day. Other roads and other seams await. But that road is no longer there.
—Neil King, Jr., American Ramble

I hope to someday awake from a dream postseason to find the dream reached its optimal conclusion, and that my first thought come daybreak is, “I’m really gonna have to get rolling if I wanna make that parade.” Such a morning hasn’t happened for the longest time. Instead, I follow a pattern I inadvertently established a quarter-century ago this week and have repeated as applicable.

The Mets’ valiant attempt to attain a championship lands shy of its goal.

I stew for several wee hours.

I nod off jarred by the reality that has set in.

I rise sleepily to confirm that, after weeks/months spent navigating the edge of heaven, joy has morphed to void.

Postseason has become offseason.

The Mets of this year are, at once, the Mets of last year.

No matter how great it all was — and in the part of 2024 we shall recall as “2024,” all but four miserable NLCS losses of it was great — it ends. The siren song of possibility was extremely loud. The sense of ultimate reward was incredibly close. These opportunities have proven intermittent over the past 25 years. How can the absolute most not be made of them? At minimum, another game should await. At maximum, paper shredders should be revving on our team’s behalf in the office buildings of Lower Broadway a couple of weeks hence to ensure an adequate supply of ticker tape. Instead, there’s no game the next night or any night soon, and we’ll have to wait for another collection of Mets to have garbage thrown out of windows at them with adoration. Another opportunity has gone by the boards, and another inadvertently established pattern takes hold. In our virtual councils, we pat one another on the back. In real life, we graciously accept well-meaning pats on the heads from those outside our immediate sphere of interest. Everywhere, we necessarily move on from what we perceive as a Met job well done, if not thoroughly completed.

After living in a veritable highlight reel for nearly two months, leaving it is a drag. The first day realizing that the montage won’t be added to is inevitably cold and barren, even if we are convinced that inside we should be feeling warm all over. On the Monday after the Sunday that ended the 2024 Mets’ ride through euphoria, I mustered the wherewithal to peer over the horizon toward conceivably happier endings. Maybe, I told myself, we’re the 2015 Cubs, who we were chuffed to watch get swept by the 2015 Mets in that year’s NLCS. Those Cubs didn’t reach a conclusion. They had finished only their prelude to the world championship they went on to capture in 2016. That’s a template I can envision bridging the disappointment I’m sorting through presently and the celebration I seek eventually.

Still, I take my cues from Francisco Lindor. I look at Lindor the way Mr. Thomson, Secretary of the Continental Congress, looked at George Washington in 1776. John Adams wondered whether this man Thomson, whose responsibilities in the movie consisted of calling the roll and reading aloud dispatches delivered from the front, stood with the pro- or anti-independence forces in Congress. “I stand with the General,” Thomson replied. When Adams found this response unsatisfactory, Thomson explained, as he unfurled another military missive from G. Washington, “Well, lately, I’ve had the oddest feeling that he’s been writing to me.” Lindor blasted a grand slam that effectively clinched the Division Series, yet treated his trip around the bases as if it were just another drill in Port St. Lucie: head down; one foot placed in front of the other at a brisk and steady tempo; every base and then home plate touched; priority shifting from offense to defense upon the recording of the third out. Taking a 4-1 lead in the sixth inning and simultaneously dealing a death blow to the Phillies’ chances wasn’t Lindor’s mission. Winning the World Series was. Six games versus Los Angeles later, it still is.

Mine, too. It wasn’t something I considered within reach when 2024 commenced, but there it was, two handfuls of wins away. Too close for consolation pats. I think that’s why I valued our MVP’s trot as much as his blast. So when Lindor was asked, following the Mets’ elimination, if he considered the organization well-positioned to maintain the level to which the club had surprisingly ascended this fall, he expressed positivity, though added quickly, “Nothing’s promised in this game.” He repeated the phrase twice more, and a moment later reminded reporters, “Every year, whether you have the same guys or not, it’s a different year.”

I stand with the shortstop.

He’ll be back. Many if not all of the Mets with whom we made common cause will return, too. Some won’t. We’ll know who’s not here anymore by the way the montages are edited for 2025 viewing. Lindor’s myriad dramatic hits will be included, as will those stroked by Brandon Nimmo and Mark Vientos. Nimmo, like Lindor, is under contract for years to come. Vientos is under team control and won’t be going anywhere, except perhaps across the infield, depending on whether the incumbent first baseman who homered four times in the postseason is afflicted by lucrative wanderlust.

I sure hope Pete Alonso stays. Maybe there can be another postseason without him. It won’t be as awesome a party. Same for the several other key Mets who will file for free agency. You can’t keep everybody, and our discerning president of baseball operations understands that you probably shouldn’t. Nevertheless, who wants to bid adieu to Alonso, Manaea, Severino, Quintana, Iglesias, Winker and whoever else imprinted themselves on our souls over the past few months? Who would ever want what he had going in 2024 to end? Besides the Dodgers, I mean?

It was gonna end sooner or later. It could have ended better. It couldn’t have proceeded with a whole lot more elation. That’s what’s beginning to fill the void for me as the second day of the offseason that used to be the postseason prepares to dawn. This oughta be a time for revel rather than regret. That reel we lived in contained the highest of highlights. Close your eyes and watch them on a loop. You won’t be sorry.

A discussion of how the Mets’ postseason ended and why the end hardly defines the whole is up at National League Town.