Mets dealt heartbreaking reminder about October magic

PHILADELPHIA — This was a reminder, at a most inopportune time: no one team corners the market on magic in October.Not even a team who regularly has “Amazin’ ” and “Miracle” as their unofficial first name.

Not even when that team, the Mets, has broken out the witchcraft so regularly at so many unexpected times across the past week.The Phillies, it turns out, still know a thing or two about the subject.And the Phillies are still a hell of a club, and know how to put that magic to good use.So this series will return to Queens in a flat-footed tie after this 7-6 win for the Phillies, a game in which the Mets led 3-0 and 4-3, then rallied from 6-4 down with one out in the ninth thanks to the bat of a fearless kid named Mark Vientos.The Mets lost because for one of the few times so far in this series they decided to challenge Bryce Harper, and Harper hit it to the hedges in center field.They lost because Edwin Diaz, who wiggled out of Jose Butto’s jam in the seventh inning, couldn’t work his way out of his own bind in the eighth.And they lost because Philly’s Nick Castellanos — booed mercilessly earlier in the game by his own fans — hooked a hanging slider from losing pitcher Tylor Megill into left field, detonating Citizens Bank Park and resuscitating the Phillies as it seemed they might be inching toward the darkness.Instead it was their finest hour.“An instant classic,” Brandon Nimmo called it“It feels horrible,” Megill said.

“We lost.It’s not the way you want it to go.”Now we have a genuine happening scheduled for Tuesday afternoon at Citi Field.

We have Game 3, which ought to be a three-hour study in hearing loss.We would say the Phillies have the momentum but the way this series has gone across the first 18 innings neither team probably wants it.

So far, both teams are at their most dangerous when it seems like the other dugout is flooded with adrenaline.“We came back in the ninth inning after losing the lead,” Mets manag...