Mets escaping Braves doubleheader in playoffs should remind fans of time they didnt expect worst

Before we get to the memories that will be foremost on the mind of Mets fans through the 18-inning torture chamber that awaits them Monday afternoon in Atlanta, let’s start with a happier one.Let’s go back to 1973, which was the only other time that bad weather forced the Mets to play a doubleheader on the day after the regular season was supposed to end.Let’s go back to Oct.

1, 1973.Multiple days of Forrest Gump rain — you know: “little bitty stingin’ rain … and big ol’ fat rain.

Rain that flew in sideways.And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath — had washed out two days of games in Chicago.

They would have to play doubleheaders Sunday and Monday.And when Monday came, they needed to win one out of two at Wrigley Field to clinch the NL East.They won the first, in more rain, and the umps mercifully called the second one with nothing left to play for.“We’d have waited ’til Thanksgiving if we had to,” Tug McGraw said afterward, “and if so we would’ve won the game then, too.”They were a brash and confident bunch, those Mets, and so were their fans.

This was during a stretch of their history when Mets fans actually expected good things to happen to them.There was the miracle of ’69.

There was the mini-miracle of ’73.Later there would be so much good fortune and so many preferred bounces in October of 1986 it was hard to keep track of them all.The Mets lost plenty, sure, at the beginning and then in between, but it’s hard to identify one game they lost before Sept.

11, 1987, that can be called genuinely gut-wrenching, as in the-baseball-gods-hate-us gut-wrenching.Then Terry Pendleton hit a ninth-inning home run off Roger McDowell at old Shea Stadium, meaning the Mets were not going to pass the Cardinals and defend their championship.A year and a month later, also at Shea, Mike Scioscia took Doc Gooden deep in another calamitous ninth inning and so it would be the Dodgers, and not the Mets, who would b...