New York is a baseball town. The NFL has been subsumed. Stroll around the five boroughs and witness the blue-and-orange, once donned sheepishly or with dour fatalism, become Hope personified. Consider Grimace, OMG, Hawk Tuah, Polar Bear’s playoff pumpkin, and Mr. Smile, with each parabolic shot into the night making plain his case for Cooperstown. These Mets are four games away from the World Series and it can feel like, on yet another playoff weekend, there is nothing to keep them from barreling there. The bars and restaurants are humming with Mets talk. There are generations who have barely known this feeling and they will revel in it for as long as the spirit is willing.

Can the Mets, as the Padres fans once screamed in vain, beat L.A.? Yes, they can. (We told you back in March they’d be contenders.) And the Yankees, rolling into the ALCS after dispatching the Kansas City Royals in four games, will be waiting for them in the World Series if they can knock off the Cleveland Guardians. Soon, we may glide on the 4 from the Bronx to the 7 at Grand Central and change for the long, lazy ride to Flushing Meadows.

It’s been 24 years since the Yankees and Mets collided in the World Series, which was also the last time the two franchises both reached the ALCS and NLCS. Bill Clinton was president, the Twin Towers were still standing, and the Yankees’ Manhattan-born shortstop, Anthony Volpe, wasn’t yet alive. Those Yankees and Mets, unlike today’s teams, shared genuine bad blood, after a Rogers Clemens fastball smashed Mike Piazza in the head that summer. They met again in the World Series, and after Piazza shattered his bat on another Clemens fastball, the Yankees ace picked up the shard and inexplicably........

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