The above headline caused a troublesome surge of traffic on the World Wide Web. Servers as distant as Shanghai were momentarily incapacitated by the overwhelming extent of web traffic.

Then things finally settled down. A long-established reality calmed the world: I and a few others have been Mets fans since 1962 ! They do still exist and, Lord have mercy, I’ve been one of them for years now .

It went something like this: All through my childhood and well before that, everyone was a Yankee fan. Eventually, that grew wearisome to me. Yankees, Yankees. Yankees! Wasn’t anyone here in mid-north Jersey up for a little change of pace?

I was ! Why not route for the newcomer in Major League Baseball? Seven years later they won a World Championship. HELLO!

No, in that department they haven’t kept pace with the Yankees, but who has ? And, no, it hasn’t always been smooth. One memorable instance, I believe in ’64, was when Manager Casey Stengel exclaimed in the Mets dugout, “Can’t anybody here play baseball?” Was that, perhaps, a low point in the history of the franchise ?

I hope that all of my readers are happy. I’ve poked the requisite fun at the Mets, but sorry, such fun has been water off a duck’s back for 58 years now. It’s not all that hysterical anymore!

To my satisfaction, they are a quite legitimate contender in pro baseball.