Mets finally slayed Braves demons in grandest way possible

ATLANTA — Over the final two innings of the 2,428th game of this major league season, a Russian novel broke out.Heroes and goats, and goats who became heroes, and plot twists and enough themes to fill six seasons of a streaming series.In the end, to finally slay their horrors in this city — horrors that president of baseball operations David Stearns admitted needed to be eviscerated — the Mets needed arguably the biggest homer in franchise history to register their most important regular-season victory ever.All of that made this Mets season a success.

Of course, they want more.No Met was speaking as if this journey were complete, though they are going to have to go from 18 innings and overwrought emotions and champagne and cigars and another flight to face the Brewers on Tuesday in the Wild Card Series in less than 24 hours.But from where they were, at 0-5 and a May dive that felt like the same old Mets, and right through an eighth inning Monday afternoon in which they reached their highest highs and lowest lows multiple times within about 50 minutes, the Mets found the talent and temerity to assure they will be in Milwaukee — for October baseball.The Mets beat the Braves, 8-7, in the next-to-last game of this regular season.

But “won” is an inadequate verb for what transpired over three hours in the first game of a doubleheader — a twin bill baked into the Russian novel since it came wrapped in controversy about how it was derived.And that it came a day after the regular season was supposed to conclude and left the Mets with a scenario in which one win gets them in and two losses would have brought anguish.“You could write a book,” Carlos Mendoza said about the day.The Mets survived being overwhelmed by a new Braves-clad Mets killer named Spencer Schwellenbach, who feels like someone Chipper Jones and John Smoltz conjured in a laboratory to make Mets lives miserable for a decade or so.

They overcame in this city, which has served as a torture c...