MLB

Loss won’t diminish Collins’ Amazin’ premonition for Mets

Daniel Murphy (pictured), reacting after his ninth-inning fly ball ended last night’s game, and the Mets may have fallen to the Yankees.

Daniel Murphy (pictured), reacting after his ninth-inning fly ball ended last night’s game, and the Mets may have fallen to the Yankees.

For a heartbeat, it looked like the ball had a chance, looked like Daniel Murphy might’ve found the perfect moment to end a 345 at-bat homer-free drought. In that split-second, off the bat, the remnants of the largest crowd in Citi Field history, 42,122, both sides of the city’s baseball chasm, Mets fans and Yankees fans both, leapt to their feet.

In the home dugout, Terry Collins knew better.

“Nah,” the Mets’ manager said. “You can tell by the sound the ball makes off the bat.”

Soon enough, everyone else would know, the ball dying a few steps shy of the right-field wall, the ballgame dying in Nick Swisher’s glove, a 4-3 Yankees victory that evened the Queens portion of the Subway Series at a game apiece, setting up tonight’s arm-ageddon pairing of R.A. Dickey and CC Sabathia as a rubber-game adventure.

It will also be the final installment of the 25-game segment of their season was supposed to define – and likely doom – the Mets, 25 games against winning teams that would tell us so much about who the Mets were and where they were going.

At the start, they were six games over .500. This morning, they awake six games over .500. It isn’t often that 12 up and 12 down qualifies as a feel-good stretch of season, but the Mets have survived it, no matter what happens tonight.

YANKEES-METS BOX SCORE

PHOTOS: SUBWAY SERIES MOMENTS

And you no longer have to add “it’s still early” because it’s not, because by the end of next week they’ll be a step shy of the season’s halfway point and by tonight that gauntlet will be done for. The Nationals are still in sight, only 3 ½ games in front. They are still a half-game up on the Braves as the second NL wild-card.

Seventy-one games in the books, 91 to go, still a season at Citi, even if there have been more than a few games like last night, games the Mets had in hand one second and in the loss column the next.

“We have a damn good team,” said Jon Rauch, who thought he’d made a damn good pitch to Eric Chavez in the seventh before watching Chavez dunk an opposite-field homer just inside the left-field pole.

And here’s the thing: as much as the Mets’ prosperity has stunned most of baseball and many of their own fans, Collins saw it all clearly back in February, the first day of pitchers and catchers, sitting in his office at Digital Domain Park, wondering what all the doom and gloom was all about.

“I don’t see it,” Collins said, his face already fried by the February Florida sun. “Honestly. I don’t see why people think we’ll be that bad. I heard the other day someone back home said we would lose 105 games. And I just don’t see it. I see a lot of wins out there for this team.”

Collins was speaking for the record. But those quotes never made it into the next day’s newspaper. A lot of the quotes from that sit-down didn’t. I didn’t want to embarrass Collins because, damn, he sure sounded the way every manager doomed and destined for the second division has sounded going all the way back to 1880.

“I like our [starting] pitching,” he said that day. “I think we’ll have to figure out what we have in our bullpen. But it’s a long season.”

Collins took a magic marker and started jotting names on a piece of copy paper. It was his opening-day lineup. He pushed it across his desk.

“Look, it hurts me not to be able to write Jose’s name, or Carlos’ name, or Angel’s name,” Collins said, referring to the exiled threesome of Reyes, Beltran and Pagan. “But I don’t mind writing down the names I have here. I think there’s some wins in those names. Especially from this young man.”

He tapped on David Wright’s name. I wrote it all down. Figured I was doing Collins a favor keeping all that foolish optimism locked in a dog-eared notebook and out of the paper.

The manager knew best. Collins looked around his office, looked around the division, insisted it was tighter than everyone said, insisted it was there for the taking.

“I think that can be us,” he said in the middle of February. “Why can’t it be us?”

In the middle of June, even in the shadow of another stomach-churning loss, it remains a remarkably plausible question.