The reality is, going again to 1962, there aren’t a whole lot of regular-season victories that examine to the one which concluded at 4:08 p.m. on the afternoon of Sept. 30, 2024. The reality is, there’s just one that belongs in the identical class, and it had taken place 4 days shy of 1 / 4 century earlier: Oct. 4, 1999, a do-or-die, one-game playoff in Cincinnati for the Nationwide League’s wild-card berth.
In ’99, the Mets carried fairly a bit of luggage with them. It had been 11 years since their final playoff berth. A yr earlier, they’d misplaced 5 straight video games on the finish, video games 158-162, when profitable just one would’ve snuck them into one other playoff for the wild-card, a three-team round-robin with the Giants and Cubs. And there was loads of concern that Bobby Valentine, the supervisor, hadn’t but steered a staff to the postseason.
So 1999’s 5-0 win towards the Reds, behind a two-hitter from Al Leiter, was cathartic.
And nonetheless pales compared to what occurred final Sept. 30. Think about all of the layers of distress the Mets had added in 25 years: a walk-off stroll in NLCS Sport 6 to the Braves in ’99. A Subway Sequence loss in 2000. A merciless loss in Sport 7 of the 2006 NLCS, adopted up by gut-stomping collapses in 2007 and ’08. A 2015 run that led to a World Sequence horror present. One other epic collapse in 2022.
