Heroes can come from anywhere, including — in fact, especially — unexpected places.

Jerry Blevins could have been the hero of today’s game, if he’d gotten Jon Jay to open the eighth.  Jon Jay has become nothing short of tiresome, a hitter we simply can’t deal with, someone who you know shouldn’t keep getting on base, but does so anyway.  Blevins didn’t get him.

Addison Reed, likewise, could have laid claim to the day if he’d been able to retire the two hitters he faced.  Will Meyers and Matt Kemp, two sluggers, two dangerous hitters standing between Reed and a successful inning.  He didn’t get either of them.  The bases were loaded.  Antonio Bastardo was coming in.

Bastardo, so far, had been okay, so-so, meh, however you want to say it.  The sight of him didn’t send me into paroxysms of anger a la Oliver Perez, nor did it fill me with confidence, like, strangely enough, Addison Reed.  To me, to this point, he was just another reliever, slightly overpaid, moderately talented, serviceable but certainly not great.

I had, however, noticed the same thing that GK&R had noticed, early in the season: Bastardo’s fastball produced swings and misses.   He doesn’t throw as hard as he used to, but hitters simply can’t seem to catch up.

Derek Norris — whose name I can’t say without involuntarily adding “the insufferable” — Melvin Upton, and Alexei Ramirez.  A tall order, not to mention the fact that the bases were loaded and any reasonably well-struck ball in play would bring home a run.

A hard-fought strikeout.  A cleverly induced pop-up.  Another gut-wrenching, multi-pitch, strikeout.  Inning over.  Three up, three down, three runners inherited, no runs allowed.

And there you are.  There’s your hero.  From bases-loaded, no outs, up only a run, came a guy who just defined his Mets career.

A lot of Mets have these kinds of moments.  The ones we all remember, the watershed points.  The moments that make players Mets.  “He’s one of us,” we’ll say after moments like these.  “He’s a Met now.”

Tonight was Bastardo’s moment.  He’s a Met now.

Bastardo’s success is all the more important in that it came as part of preserving a lead for Matt Harvey, whose sudden rebound to his old self would have been the story of the game, but for Bastardo himself.  Indeed, despite Bastardo’s one inning of Houdini-esque escapism, Harvey probably deserves the lion’s share of game credit.

As he took the mound in the bottom of the first, it was, as have been Harvey’s past several starts, a casual first pitch with the potential to define our season.  In his past few starts, when Harvey had come out throwing 92 or 93, I’d shaken it off, telling myself that he could still be fine.  Today, when he came out in the bottom of the first throwing 96, a seven-start weight lifted itself off my shoulders.

Six innings, ten strikeouts, touching 97 on the gun.  One bad pitch aside, an almost perfect outing.

Matt Harvey is back.  And with it, our season is back on track.

Just look at the rotation: Matz and Thor are already working.  Harvey, after tonight’s start, is working as well.  Once we get deGrom working, now, the four aces will be right back where they were supposed to be, and we’ll be in even better shape than we already are.

Harvey’s sudden resurgence is the ultimate optimistic Mets fan victory.  Two starts ago, he looked better.  Then last start, he tailed off.  He wasn’t improving, some claimed.  He’d simply lost something.

But the optimists among us saw things differently.  He’d been sick, Terry Collins said.  He’d looked good early, but had tailed off later.  Perhaps it was nothing more than an inconvenient confluence of circumstances, the sickness coming just as the mechanics were on their way back.  One more start, we said, and he’d be right back to normal.

Especially in moments like this, I love being a Mets fan.  What other reason do you need to support a team, when our guy, our ace, the most outspoken of our four aces, takes the mound and affirms the franchise’s central pillar, that ya do, in fact, gotta believe?

And speaking of believing, today’s win, combined with the Nationals’ loss, shot us into first, half a game ahead of the Nationals, two games ahead of everyone else, even as the division has, so far, surprisingly failed to be the cesspool of horribleness that was predicted.  Right back ahead of the pack, even after our early struggles, the Nationals’ hot start, and the predictions that Dusty Baker finally had his team working just like they were supposed to, we’re back in front.  Back in the New York Groove.

We’re back in first, Steven Matz goes tomorrow, Matt Harvey is back, and Bartolo Colón hit a home run yesterday.

Oh, and tomorrow, we face Chase Utley.

Yeah, it’s a good time to be a Mets fan.  When you lead your division and everything’s clicking, try as some might, it’s awfully hard to find a negative.

Bartolo Colón affirms the meaning of life

Some things went wrong tonight.

The world is not perfect.  There are still problems to be fixed.  From world hunger to our bench not hitting enough, not everything was good.

Bartolo Colón hit a home run.  Nothing else matters.

When the ball left his bat, my heart seemed to slow.  Or quicken.  It was far from normal, is all I know for certain.

You could hear it in Gary Cohen’s voice.  Gary has called record-breakers, walkoffs, and no hitters.  This was the most excited he’s ever been.

You could hear it in Ron Darling’s involuntary outburst as Colón rounded the bases, rivaling Keith’s last year, when Cespedes homered off Drew Storen, effectively handing the division to the Mets.

This was better.

Why are we Mets fans?  We’re here for the moments.  We’re here for the stories.  We’re here for the human side of the game, the players we regard as friends even if they don’t feel the same way towards us.

What more is there to say?

Bartolo Colón will be 43 in 17 days.  He’s had more than 200 career plate appearances, and prior to tonight, had never hit a home run.

We love him.  He plays the game for the right reasons, the right way.  He’s out there because he loves playing baseball, and he gives us everything he has every time he takes the mound because it’s the right way to play.

And tonight, Bartolo Colón hit a goddamn home run.

“Bartolo the kid,” I once called him, and tonight, it was clearer than ever.  He simply loves the game.  He’ll play until he can’t anymore.  None of us want to get old, not even 43-year-olds who no longer even remotely resemble athletes.  Bartolo doesn’t want to have to leave either.  Eventually, he will.  But not right now.  Not tonight.

Tonight, he hit a goddamn home run.

He signed back for $7.5 million despite higher offers, because he wanted to play as much as possible, and because he liked New York.  He’s started the season 3-1, an E.R.A. under 3.00.  At 43, he looks as good as he did at 42, 41, and 40.

And now, he’s hit a goddamn home run.

This is what baseball’s all about, even more than the postseason and potential World Series.  It’s about the stories, the incredible moments, the players who defy obstacles and continue doing things that ordinary people can only dream of, conveying the message all the while that anything is possible if you just work at it.

Bartolo Colón couldn’t hit in 2014.  He improved slightly in 2015.  He kept working.

Tonight, he hit a goddamn home run.

Baseball is the greatest game in the world.  If tonight didn’t convince you, nothing will.

The National League must never adopt the Designated Hitter.  If tonight didn’t convince you, nothing will.

I’ll never give up on the Mets, because even at the lowest of moments, not that this was one, something like tonight can happen.  And after tonight, or anything like it, there’s always reason to keep going, to soldier on, to keep giving it your all.  Because as we learned tonight, life is freaking great.

To have spent time alive, on this planet, at the same time that Bartolo Colón was hitting a home run, is nothing short of a gift.  It’s an event that is so joy-inspiring, so momentous, that it’s hard to understand, even now.  Watching Colón drive the ball and then round the bases made me happier than anything I can remember in quite a long time, but even now, it’s hard to understand why.

We’ve been waiting for it for all the time that he’s been here, and that’s certainly got something to do with it, but why have we been waiting?

Maybe for just the reasons I outlined.  Maybe because this is precisely why we root for this team in the first place.  Maybe because watching a Bartolo Colón home run, telling our grandchildren about it in 60 years, and knowing that for one brief, shining moment, anything was possible, is why we made that long, bitter choice to be Mets fans.

We just watched Bartolo Colón hit a home run.  Frankly, that’s all I think I need to say.

Were there problems tonight?

Sure there were. Problems were the reason we were shut out instead of scoring six runs. Problems were the reason we gave up two runs instead of giving up none at all. But problems aren’t always the worst thing in the world.

I can’t remember the last time a Mets pitcher backed a hitter off the plate. That’s a problem. Thor, today, threw too many fastballs, and didn’t come inside nearly enough. So, problerm: pitch selection. Fortunately, that’s just about the easiest problem to fix I can think of: just put down different signs.

We seem to have stopped hitting. That’s a problem. But will it last? No, is the short answer. Everyone’s gone cold right now; Duda, Granderson, Conforto, not to mention Rene Rivera at catcher. We’ll hit again: the last time we went cold for a few games, we came back with a stretch of 12-2, or whatever that streak was. We’ve got an offense, and a good one. All offenses go cold for a game or two here and there, good ones included. We’ll be fine.

But look on the bright side, and I do, because I’m a goddamm Mets fan. Those were our problems: their hitters on our pitchers, our offense suddenly gone cold. We can fix those two problems: it could happen relatively easily. And then where are we?

We’re winning. We’re dominating everyone we face. We’re pitching shutouts and putting up runs, and we’re unbeatable.

Of course, it didn’t help that, through these first two games, we haven’t exactly gotten the benefit of luck. More than a few times, we’ve hit balls hard and had them caught. It’s yet another thing that all teams go through. We all know the symptoms: you barely look up on a deep fly ball, because you know it’ll be caught on the warning track. You don’t even get excited on a check swing, because you know we’re not getting the call.

Again, this has happened to us before, and what did we do, the last time it did? We went out and won five straight series.

We’re due an improvement in BABIP, just as we’re due for our opponents’ BABIP to drop. We’ve got a few problems: when we fix them, we’ll be just fine.

And while we’re at it, look at the positives from tonight. The captain walked twice, as he’s done and should continue to do. Henderson and Reed were flawless. Rene Rivera threw two bullets from behind the plate. Cabrera had two more hits. Hell, even Wilmer got off the schneid, with a double that could or should have scored a run, depending on your interpretation of an increasingly murky rulebook. But I digress.

We’ve lost two in a row; that happens. They haven’t been terrible losses, but the kind that all teams go through. We’ve got some luck coming our way, and with the team we’ve got, that little bit of luck should translate into a big bunch of wins.

Tomorrow, it’s Bartolo — just the guy we need, to change something up and turn fortunes our way. After that, it’s Harvey, over his illness and looking to finally bring himself back. Call me overoptimistic; I think he can do it.

Thor didn’t bring the lightning today, at least not to its full potential, and the offense wasn’t exactly electric either. Neither of those things are the norm: both figure to be rare occurrences.

And when the norm comes back, we start winning again. So let’s just stick with the team we’ve got, and go get a win tomorrow.

Through six we were no-hit
I was thinking oh shit
Our bats had seemed simply to fade

Every ball that we struck
Couldn’t seem to find luck
Padres defense was perfectly played

Grandy hit one well
From contact I could tell
That today it would simply be caught

We’ve been hitting the ball
But our liners won’t fall
We all hope it won’t go for naught

deGrom wasn’t great
As the innings got late
He just couldn’t get on a tear

Lord, please fix our arms
Protect them from harm
To hurt them is simply unfair

Yo broke up the bid
A slow single he did
And hoped that our offense would follow

But it was not to be
And against Colin Rea
Our offense continued to wallow

To the ninth we went
When Granderson sent
A pitch soaring right back up the middle

The fence it cleared
And I silently cheered
But it seemed like too late and too little

The captain drew a pass
As a man of great class
Always willing to walk, ‘cause he’s selfless

Got it to Yo
And we all seemed to know
That Brad Hand on the mound was just helpless

Sure enough Yo went deep
And if not quite a leap
I did give a bit of a prance

Tying run on deck
And our lineup ain’t drek
Suddenly we had a chance

But it was not to be
As we could all see
Luck was simply not on our side

A game we should have won
But hell, it was fun
Obvious how hard our guys tried

We ended the night
On two line outs to right
As far as areas go, that one’s gray

On the one hand it’s bad
But it also helps pad
Our batting average on balls in play

Though we may have seemed thin
This should have been a win
When you take away errors and such

I don’t really mind
For tomorrow we’ll find
That we hit once again in the clutch

We’ve done plenty fine
One loss won’t undermine
In this series we should win three more

In game two it begins
And we’ll look for a win
Because out on the mound we’ve got Thor

All seemed lost yesterday, didn’t it?  We couldn’t hit to save our lives; we hadn’t scored in 17 innings; we had just lost to the Braves, the worst team money can buy.

The difference 24 hours can make has been illustrated, by games like today’s, time and again, but it never fails to amaze.

I sat in a hot, sweaty room, taking a spanish test, as the game began.  I’ll be done in two weeks; until then, I’ve got three hours of Mets baseball a day to sustain me.

My phone buzzed; I checked the clock.  1:37.

Was it the bottom of the first?  Top of the second?  Bottom of the second?  Who had scored?  I had no way to tell.

But didn’t I?

We’d had some of our worst luck of the year the previous night, hitting line drives left and right that simply refused to find the grass.  We had Steven Matz on the mound, rearing to continue lowering his E.R.A. from its high-water mark of 37.20.  We had luck on our side.

Of course we would score first.

I will admit, though, that upon checking my phone after finishing the test, I was more than a little surprised to find that Rene Rivera had done the hitting for us.  I’d thought that Rene Rivera was one of those guys whose offense was rumored, but never actually observed.  As the Mets have been doing since being 2-5, he proved the detractors wrong.

Two in the second; four in the third; two in the fifth.  And all this scoring without the captain in the lineup; with Conforto taking an ofer, along with Granderson and Walker; with Plawecki on the bench as well.  But this is what good teams do, and we’re nothing if not a good team: they beat the obstacles.  They win even when things don’t look good.

Of course, given the performance that Matz turned in on the mound, a loss, today, would have been hard to come by.  Matz is 4-1, 2.83 E.R.A.  His E.R.A. is less than 1/13 of what it was after his first start.  He’s won four consecutive decisions.  Since that infamous anonymous scout assessed that he needed some more time in the minors, his E.R.A. is substantially below 1.00.

In offseason discussion of the four aces, consensus was that Matz hadn’t yet proven himself.  Has he done so yet?  Can we, to paraphrase an erstwhile former presidential candidate, dispense with the fiction that Steven Matz doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing?

Just look at the line: 7.2 innings, two hits, no walks, no runs, eight strikeouts.  Yes, it’s the Braves.  It’s also a Braves lineup that scored three runs yesterday.  Matz was masterful; Matz is, as a matter of course, masterful.  Or Matz-terful.  He’s got a name that befits mastery for the Mets, not that his name has contributed at all to the success he’s seen so far.

We’re 17-9, and that’s despite some bad luck, a struggling Matt Harvey who may yet return to form, and a 2-5 start.  Can you imagine what we’ll do when we’re working perfectly?

Hell, it might start tomorrow.  I mean, it could start anytime — that’s the beauty of this team.  But really, it might start tomorrow.

We’re off to San Diego for three with the Padres.  We’ve got deGrom, Thor, and Bartolo.  They’ve got three Padres starters.

My dad texted me after the win, as he’s taken to doing since I’ve been away from home.  “The Mets won their sixth consecutive series for the first time since 2006,” he wrote.

Six?  That’s nothing.  We’ve got the Padres coming up, then the Dodgers, then the Rockies, then the Nationals.  Let’s make it ten.  Hell, let’s win every series we play.

It’s almost hard not to, when you’ve got deGrom, Thor, or Matz going three out of every five days, not to mention Harvey and Bartolo on the other two.

“I take positives out of negatives all the time,” David Wright once said.  I’ll try to channel that sentiment here, because if we’re honest, there’s not a whole lot that the Mets did wrong today, and there’s even less that the Braves did right.

The Braves scored three runs, all wholly undeserved in true Atlantean spirit.  The runs came on a home run from Mallex Smith, which came on one of the least powerful swings I can remember seeing, an A.J. Pierzinski double, which frankly shouldn’t count anymore given how much of an absolute turd A.J. Pierzinski is, and a wild pitch, that somehow snuck under Plawecki’s glove despite the fact that the glove was on the ground, which allowed Pierzinski to score from third, after he’d gone to third on a sacrifice fly, which, again, will almost certainly not happen again this millennium.

Fuck the Braves, honestly.  They deserve nothing; tonight, they got everything.  They deserve 19 losses in 19 tries against us this year; it seems we’ll have to settle for 18 out of 19.

Because losing a series to the Braves?  That’s just not something we’re going to do.

Everything was conspiring, today, to turn the game in the Braves’ favor.  You could tell from the outset, with Grandy lining out to Freeman, the captain lining out to Smith, Conforto walking, and Cespedes making an out.  It just wasn’t going our way.

If we’re honest, Harvey didn’t even have that bad a game.  No, he didn’t look good, but he also allowed his runs in the most undeserved fashion that I can possibly imagine.  His velocity was down, but until he got tired, he was fine.  In fact, he was sick, according to rumors before the game — he was hitting 95 on the gun in the third and fourth innings.  Being the optimist that I am, I’ll go ahead and say that the fifth is when the sickness kicked in.

Harvey, after all, had been improving prior to this start, and we’ve seen, in the past, that sickness has diminished his capabilities.  Is it any wonder, given the luck he’s had over his career, that his sickness just happened to coincide with his period of improvement?  He’ll be back and he’ll be better when he takes the mound in five days; you can take that to the bank.

But really, the forces conspiring to give the game to the Braves were hard to fathom.  Gary Cohen mentioned, at one point, that Matt Wisler, who was one-hitting the Mets despite allowing line drives that, well, whistled past his head every other batter, had worked over the offseason on his changeup.  He’d been instructed by Tom Glav!ne.

Seriously, Tom Fucking Glav!ne.  As if the Braves needed another reminder of all the luck they’d once had.

Wisler’s performance was referred to as “spectacular” or “brilliant” or some variant thereof by the SNY booth roughly once a batter, and frankly, they should have known better.  This wasn’t a stunning display of pitching any more than Ruben Tejada’s improbable inside-the-park home run last year was a stunning demonstration of power.  Wisler had four — count ‘em, four — strikeouts.  He barely threw more strikes than balls.  He gave up about twelve line drives that should EASILY have gone for hits. Our BABIP, today, was low enough to shock: namely, it was one over however many balls we put in play.  Our line drive percentage, meanwhile, not to mention our hard-hit rate, was off the charts.

So how do you take a positive from a negative here?  It’s not hard; we’ve got the Braves again tomorrow, and 13 more times after that.  Today, we earned about 13 wins worth of luck against the Braves going forward.  Combine that with the fact that the Braves have one of the worst teams of all time, and you’ve got a recipe for continued success against the Braves going forward, especially when we face Matt Wisler once again and serve him up a reminder that line drives, as a matter of course, don’t usually find opposing mitts.

That’s another great thing about this team: it’s hard to get down.  We’ve got Matz tomorrow; he’s great.  Then we’ve got deGrom; he’s damn good as well. Then Thor; we all know he’s mighty fine.

They’re the Braves. They suck.  Let’s go win the series tomorrow, when luck turns back our way.  ‘Nuff said.

Who was it who said, for the first time, that you couldn’t predict baseball?

Well, he was right tonight, and then some.  Because just as I was thinking of how applicable the quote was to the instance at hand, of a 43 year old, 300 pound pitcher throwing eight shutout innings and, by appearance if not reality, on his way to a complete game shutout, baseball proved, yet again, that even when it’s unpredictable, you can’t predict it.

What was Jeurys Familia doing on the mound in a 4-0 game?  Against a Braves team that had barely hit all day?  Replacing a pitcher who had cruised through the previous eight innings?  Neither of us knew either.

Familia is our closer, an arm we may need tomorrow, a fireballing, young reliever who is in his place amongst the National League leaders in appearances.  It was not a save situation.  Bartolo, you felt, could have thrown eight more innings if necessary.

I don’t know what Familia was doing in the game.  Sometimes, I think Terry Collins just likes to see what happens when he manages completely against common sense, and for now, at least, it turned out fine.

Bartolo, with the win, surpassed Pedro Martinez on the all-time list of wins by Dominican-born pitchers, and a more fitting successor, I’m sure Pedro himself cannot imagine.  Pedro, who once started dancing when the sprinklers disrupted his start.  Pedro, of current fame for his oft-vined shout of “THOOOOOOOOR!” during last year’s World Series broadcast.  Pedro, who by all accounts was the goofiest, funniest, liveliest, most energetic guy in a clubhouse that also contained Jose Reyes.

Pedro’s down to number three now; Bartolo is at number two.  I doubt either of them cares very much.  I can’t help but imagine some kind of TV special, “A Conversation With Pedro and Bartolo.”  The kind of thing the producers hoped be a serious conversation about what it meant to pitch in the major leagues, but would inevitably turn into shared stories of clubhouse pranks, wacky escapades, and ridiculous hijinks that, while perhaps not the most poignant, were certainly more than their share of fun.

And as the producers looked on in horror, watching their show that was meant to be deep and somber, turn into a festival of laughs, they’d be the ones forgetting that those kinds of things are what it means to pitch in the major leagues.

We all love players who are enthusiastic, energetic, youthful — guys who have maintained a sense of fun from little league fields of childhood, who are playing baseball because it’s the greatest game in the world.  Of course, most players are like that, but there are guys who go the extra mile.  David Wright, the captain, who cares more than anyone on the field but always remembers that it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.  Curtis Granderson, about whom the same could be said.  And, of course, Bartolo.

It’s the behind-the-back flip that makes of love Bartolo like we do, but even more, the guilty smile after the play, as if he knows that he shouldn’t have done what he did even if it worked out fine.  It’s the wild, flailing swing that occasionally makes contact and even more occasionally puts the ball in play — he nearly lined the ball down the left field line for what I like to think would have been a triple today, but it was foul by a foot or so, and in all likelihood, would have gone for a double regardless — but even more than the swing, it’s the smile after he’s done at the plate, that says that even though it’s not his job to hit, he’s gone up there and given it his best.

Bartolo the kid reacts with ageless enthusiasm as Grandy drives him home with a homer, neither expression looking out of place on a little league field

And, of course, it’s the fact that he’s still out there, a long, bumpy, 22 year career, 220 wins in the bag and a few more to come.  “We’re all told at some point that we can no longer play the children’s game,” said the well-meaning but badly mistaken scout in Moneyball.  “Some of us are told at 18, some of us are told at 40.  But we’re all told.”  Correct, obviously, in the vast majority of circumstances — but this isn’t one of them.  Bartolo’s still out there playing the children’s game with all the energy of a 15 year old kid, and as long as he’s pitching eight scoreless innings and being denied the chance at a ninth, he’ll continue to do so.

Meanwhile, while Bartolo was stealing the show and our hearts, we were scoring four runs in the first on home runs from the captain — another who is still playing the children’s game — Cespedes, and Duda, good for two runs more than we would need.  Come on — they’re the Braves, on track to have the worst season in MLB history, and looking, early on, like they might just stick to that track all the way to the end.  We’re a team and a damn good one, with a dog in the fight for the National League.

And when we get done sweeping the Braves on Wednesday, and later in the year, when we finish beating them in every one of our 19 matchups, we’ll have gone a long way towards proving it.

Our streak of eight ended yesterday; tonight, a new one began.  We’ve got the Braves, then the Padres — those are six chances, right there, to show we’re as good a team as we say.  Then we’ve got the Dodgers, who are due a world of hurt at our expense.  Then the Rockies, who we showed we could beat last year, then the Nationals, who are due for a little reminder that they can’t lay claim to the division just yet.

Sound like a tough stretch?  No?  Well, that’s because for us, no stretch is particularly tough.  We’ll get through the Braves, and the Padres, and whoever gets thrown at us.  We’ve got four aces to make sure of it.

And then, on the fifth day, when we don’t have an ace, we’ve got the most endearing of the bunch: Bartolo himself.

Ah well.

We didn’t have it today, which, after eight consecutive wins, has to be expected at some point.  Thor wasn’t at his best, the offense was going up against the eternally irksome Madison Bumgarner, and, well, we lost.

For what it’s worth, it was our fifth straight series win.  It’s not worth much.  The Nationals won again; they’ll lose eventually, but they’re not doing it nearly enough.

We’re 15-8, and the Nationals, barring a Cardinals rally, will be 17-7.  Eh, so what?  Losses, wins, they happen.

We’ll get going again; our four aces will get their pitches moving just the right way, our bats will start swinging better than today, and we’ll go out and beat the Braves.  That doesn’t make it any more fun watching our winning streak dissolve into incompetence against those preternaturally annoying Giants, but hey, it is what it is.

It didn’t help, either, that Terry built his lineup around the concept of righty/lefty matchups, which I thought had been discredited, at least as an automatic playing time determinant.  Asdrubal Cabrera is better — significantly better, in fact — than Wilmer Flores against lefties, and even if he is a tad better, no one wanted to see Eric Campbell in the lineup.  But again, it’s a loss.  It happens; the lineup didn’t change much.

So we move on.  We stay home and take on the Braves and beat them down.  We keep playing our game; we hit and pitch and keep doing everything better than most other teams in the league do.  It’s not that hard, with the team we’ve got: we just didn’t do it today.

Conforto.  Cespedes.  Wright, Walker, and Duda.  Cabrera, Granderson, and even Plawecki.  The Giants held us down today.

Do we really think that’s going to last?  Let’s be serious here.

Remember a few weeks ago, when some people wanted to start panicking, and others, myself among them, were of the opinion that seven games into the season was too early to lose our heads?

For multiple reasons, I’m glad I was right.  And it applies to our now-eight game winning streak every bit as much as it applied to today’s eighth inning.

We were up three.  It shrunk to two, and then one.  Twice, it looked like we would go behind.  We didn’t.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s start in the first inning, because that’s where we’ve gotten used to starting these last few games.  Two singles and a walk load the bases.  One of them, of course, comes from Michael Conforto.  Neil Walker singles; two runs score.

Nice and easy; simple, quality run production.  All a lineup needs to do.

Then we move ahead to the second: hit-by-pitch, sac bunt, hit by pitch, 2 RBI double.  From, of course, Michael Conforto.

Then the fifth.  After an Asdrubal Cabrera flyout, a solo home run.  From Michael Conforto.

Then finally, because I guess even Michael Conforto is at least partially human, we scored our final run of the day without him.

Two themes resonate here.  Our offense is damn good.  And Michael Conforto is the same.

Our offense is scoring runs as we’ve always heard they were meant to be scored.  Getting on base.  Stringing hits together and driving runners in.  And, of course, the occasional home run.

All coming, for the most part, from Michael Conforto.

Really, what can you say about Conforto at this point?  He’s batting .365 with a .442 OBP.  He’s got four home runs, and doubles in six straight games.  In the first 77 games of his career, he’s been better, by a substantial margin, than Bryce Harper or Mike Trout.

His swing is music to the eyes, and the ball off his bat, music to the ears.  His batting stance is simple, yet his stroke flows like water.  He takes the ball to left, center, and right with equal power. Every pitch he sees, he can hit.

He knows the strike zone.  He stands at the plate with the poise and command of a much more seasoned veteran.  He swings at good pitches, and leaves the bad ones.  He knows how to avoid a strikeout, and how to take a walk.

He’s humble, well spoken, and professional.  With a classic swing, hustle on the base paths, and fundamental defense, he’s a model ballplayer.  He does the all the right things on the field, and we haven’t heard of his doing anything off it.

Michael Conforto is freakin’ great.

Now, I’ll control myself for a moment, and talk about the game DID YOU SEE HIS SWING IT’S THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING no really I’ll talk about the game.  We had deGrom; they had Matt Cain.  One in his prime; one past it.  But again, deGrom wasn’t at his best.

Besides Thor, none of our starters have really reached their absolute best yet.  Today, deGrom got the job done, because he’s Jacob deGrom and he’s not going to go out there and lose, but he did it without his best velocity or command.  The velocity had crept up since his last start, and he was sitting at 94 and touching 95-96, but he wasn’t where we know he can go.

Some of his command was missing as well; he walked four, four more than you’d expect him to walk.  He struck out five, five fewer than you’d expect him to strike out.  And through it all, against the Giants’ quality lineup, he went six innings and, but for a Wilmer Flores error that we all saw coming from miles away, wouldn’t have allowed a run.

Through the early goings, we can agree, deGrom has looked good, but not quite great.  He’s been fine, of course; even below what he did last year, he’d be fine.  But he hasn’t quite turned in the dominant performance we’ve been waiting for.

DeGrom is 3-0 with a 1.02 E.R.A..  How’s that?

After deGrom left, that’s when things began to get dicey, because as we’re constantly told, the bridge to Familia is in danger.  First it was Jim Henderson, who struck out the first two batters he faced, and then, after an estimated 47 close calls that didn’t go his way, allowed two runners to reach.

Then it was Addison Reed, who entered to strike our Angel Pagan.  I’ve described it before, and is hasn’t failed yet, despite continuing not to be supported by any quantitative or qualitative evidence that I know of: the sight of Addison Reed on the mound fills me with confidence.  I don’t know why it is: the simple motion, the straight fastball, and the usually superb location combine to create a wonderful sense of security.

Reed had it in the seventh, but not the eighth, so Robles came in with the bases loaded, and in a display of pitching that played its own small part in affirming my conviction that all the bad luck we’ve been through will flip in our favor some time.  Robles allowed consecutive sac flies that, combined, traveled maybe 740 feet.  Had they gone 743, we’d have been down two runs.  As it stood, we were up one.

Sometimes, it may seem like we don’t get the luck we deserve.  Indeed, I firmly believe the truth of that statement; luck has been screwing us over for years.  But today, we had fortunes on our side.

Not that that makes the win any less important.

And then Robles lost himself too, so Blevins came in.  He of the former 20-some-odd men retired as a Met streak, he who himself had, in 2015, been through a spiral of bad luck that, if anything, made him as true a Met as anyone I can think of.

He needed an out, and he got one.  Inning over.

Then, finally, it was Familia, who can just never seem to nail down a clean inning.  Obviously, I’m wrong: Familia has nailed down his share and more of clean innings.  It just never seems to actually happen.  It’s a clearly nonsensical paradox that doesn’t make any sense at all.  And it comes down, once again, to the luck of the Mets fan.

Sure enough, Familia allowed Denard Span to reach base.  This was already trouble, I was sure.

I’d forgotten that today, luck was on our side.

A ground ball.  A new double play combination that works faster than the old one.  A runner fast enough to beat out a throw from Wilmer, but not quite quick enough to beat Cabrera.  A challenge that had already been unsuccessfully used up.

Put it all together for two down, nobody on.  A messy Matt Duffy groundout later, the game was in the books.

So, looking back at everything, we’re doing pretty well.  Today’s win makes five series wins in a row, and tomorrow, assuming the bad weather holds off (and we’ve got the one guy for whom it should), we’ve got Thor, and that’s a recipe to sweep a series if ever I’ve seen one.

No one said it would be easy, as today’s slog to the finish proved. But we’re a good team, so we win the tough games.  Simple as that.

Tomorrow, with Bumgarner on the mound, should be a tough game.  But so what?  As we demonstrated today, we’ll just keep doing what good teams do.  Now let’s move that ticker up to nine, and then, against the Braves’ mess of a team, up to twelve.

We’d won eleven in a row, and scored eleven in an inning.  We’ve bettered one of those; time to do the same to the other.