MLB

GRASPING AT STRAW

PORT ST. LUCIE – Darryl Strawberry returned to the Mets clubhouse yesterday as a cautionary tale, and not for what you think.

Sure Strawberry is a living, breathing “just say no” symbol, 6-foot-6 of what might have been had cocaine and alcohol never invaded his life. But the regret in his life is not just about wasted talent. It is about wasted opportunity to partner with greatness.

It is about championships left on a table in the late 1980s, yes, in part because “We were a party animal team,” according to an admitted leader of the Mets’ zoo. Mainly, though, Strawberry bemoans an overall lack of focus that infected those teams; an inability in real time to see what season after season was dripping away until it was completely gone, dead to baseball old age and a desire by upper management to disappear one party animal after another.

There was a championship in 1986, but that’s not what Strawberry thinks about years later.

“We should have won three titles, heck, we should have won four,” he said. “We should have been like the Yankee teams I was on in the late ’90s that just rolled to a bunch of titles.”

Strawberry returns now to the Mets, once more on the company payroll for a variety of tasks, including outfield instructor this spring. He joins a club, Strawberry said, “That reminds me of us.” In that, he means the teams from the late 1980s. “The one predicted to win,” he explained.

These Mets have yet to handle that burden well, turning frontrunner status to sorrow in each of the past two seasons. The Mets lost a home NLCS Game 7 to the Cardinals in 2006, heavy favorites being vanquished at Shea Stadium. Then last year the Mets suffered the worst collapse in regular-season history, blowing a seven-game NL East lead over the final 17 games, a seeming mathematical impossibility coming to oh too real life. The overconfident hare being conquered by the tortoise.

“You look at what happened to them last year, it was heartbreaking,” Strawberry said. “It kind of reminds me of ’88. We took it for granted that we would beat L.A. [in the NLCS]. And we lost our focus and we lost that series [in seven games]. We should have played in that World Series. We should have played Oakland. But that was us. Every year we put the best team in baseball on the field and we didn’t accomplish what we should have. We should have won more than two division titles and one World Series.”

Now here are the Mets, Johan Santana serving as human whitewash to the collapse. His mere acquisition has spun conversation forward, away from that epic crumble, but toward enormous expectations. Even Fred Wilpon, the anti-Hank Steinbrenner, stepped from his humble, conservative bubble wrap to proclaim a need for late October. The equation of Santana plus the NL’s largest payroll requires at least a World Series appearance, if not an outright parade.

“You have to seize the opportunity,” David Wright concurred. “We have a lot of guys in their prime. You can’t sit around and say ‘Not this year, it will be next year.’ We need to think about now.”

Keith Hernandez, another member of the late 1980s Mets, vouches for that. He talked about how injury – the main topic now in this camp – swept through the rotation in 1987, “and kept us from repeating.”

“That is the one that still sticks in my craw,” he said. “We should have won again.”

The following year, suddenly, the bonhomie that had united that club fractured, Hernandez recalled, gone inexplicably, but irretrievably.

At that moment, the Mets did not imagine the good times were done. But they were. Only now can a player such as Strawberry have the wisdom to see the waste. Yet in his mentor position, Strawberry said you “don’t want to force” a message on anybody. He hopes, instead, it surfaces naturally in conversation where he can counsel and cajole, make younger men see that opportunity is not promised, that what appears like it will last for years might not.

Gazing in thought, Strawberry snapped his fingers twice and said: “It doesn’t last forever. It is gone like that.”

joel.sherman@nypost.com