Sunday, October 22, 2006

Two days later

I expect this will be the last time I write about the Mets for a few months.

I woke up this morning and I'm still replaying the 9th inning in my head. Errrrr. The "agony of defeat".

If you're not a die-hard sports fan this may sound strange, but there's a hole in my life now. Ever since April 3 I've been listening to the Met games on a nearly daily basis. I probably listened to 135 of the team's 162 games and watched another 15 or so. When you add in the blogs and newspaper articles I've read, well that's a lot of time I suddenly have free. And, at the moment the only thing filling the gap is all those "What if's?".

Some Met fans feel the team underachieved by not making the World Series. Maybe, if you put a lot of stock in the regular season. The regular season is important, but it's been seriously undermined by baseball authorities, who believe that 8 teams should compete for the World Series title despite such a long season. Anyway, the Cardinals may have underperformed during the regular season, but they were clear favorites to win the National League back when the season started. The Mets were expected to be no better than the 4th best team in the league.

This was a great year. It should have ended in victory because that's how fairy tales end. Sure I'm looking forward to next year, but next year hope will be replaced by expectation. 5 months to Opening Day.