"Those Enervatin' Mets"

They're not mine. Not by a longshot. I hail from the suburbs of Philadelphia, and as such, I usually hail frozen teardrops down my face every time a major sporting season draws to its painful conclusion. Usually, the waterworks are caused by pedestrian mediocrity. But every once in a while, when it's supposed to be our turn to shine, the squads from the Quaker City find a special, startlingly original way to flip the script and self-inflict wounds to our sports psyche. Kind of like how White Boy Bob auto-eradicates in "Out of Sight."

Of course, there was Mitch Williams soft-tossing an entire city's heart, like a hobbled pinata, over the plate in 1993 so nice-guy Blue Jay Joe Carter (a Philly native!) could bash it to bits, scattering bits of hoagie and hope across the desolate Canadian landscape. Then there was the Super Bowl a couple years back, where Donovan McNabb irrigated the field with Chunky Soup, and Coach Andy Reid managed the clock with such Daliesque abstraction that Cecil B. DeBelichick didn't even have to use his zoom lens once.

But the baseball season of 2007 has changed all that. Even if a World Series crown isn't in the offing. Not even if the Fightin Phils get sent on Holliday by those scorching Rockies or get Peaved by the Padres. Nope, where once we were blind, now we can see, hon.

We did it, thanks to NL MVP Jimmy Rollins and the rest of his mates. (I know, Matt Holliday was awesome, and the Brewers' stout and steady Prince Fielder did exactly what our Ryan Howard did last season when he won the MVP, but guess what? There wasn't any Broad Street Jimmy last year, making like Broadway Joe with the brazen talk, and then slashing, stealing, and smothering his foes to death, all with a smile.) (great pre-season piece by Jayson Stark here)

The New York Mets had a seven-game lead with 17 days left in the season. It wasn't enough. They stumbled badly, losing to teams with inferior talent and taking on the unmistakable stench of panic in the stretch run. But one of the big reasons that happened was because the Phils, with booming bats and marginal pitching (marginal, only if you were to personally gerrymander the margins), never went away. And they also happened to thump those Mets seven times in 20 days, sending shivers up their superstar spines and letting them know, that in the words of J-Roll, they truly were "the team to beat."

John Maine's masterful no-hit bid on Saturday to tie up the division one day after the Phils finally reached first place was nothing more than rigor mortis. The Mets were already a corpse, and the Phillies loss was nothing more than a hangover, because they just knew that they were the team to beat, and it was really up to them what happened.

It still is. This current club not only exorcised their own Just Shy Demons of the past few years, making it to the post-season for the first time since '93, but perhaps most importantly for the old-time fans, they exhumed the biggest skeleton in our closet, the Grand-daddy of 1964, and made xylophones of the bones. Back in that season, when there weren't even divisions, the high-flyin' Phils led the whole National League by 6.5 games with 12 to play, and then... proceeded to collapse like a decaffeinated coffee table. Their bottom-out beat even these modern-day Mets, and scarred the Phaithful for a long, long time.

For now, the cleat is on the other foot, and Philadelphia (despite McNabb's Sunday Night Sackathon) is stepping lively.