If you had to come up with a list of the 100 quintessential things about the Mets that you needed to know, what would they be? You could take the best 100 of the 800-plus players in franchise history, and weave in the managers. You could take the 100 most important games the team has played, but you'd be grasping toward the end. You could take 100 experiences from a Mets fan's perspective and arrange them from top to bottom. You could take the top 100 key moments from a historical perspective. Or you could throw them all together and dive right in. Picking these moments takes a thorough knowledge of baseball history, a floor strewn with books and printouts, an electronic spreadsheet that allows for constant resorting, and a pressing deadline. One thing that wasn't agonized over was the understanding that rooting for the Mets is the greatest test of a sports fan's soul in New York. The sweeping highs and lows, the inferiority complex that comes from living in the shadow of Big Brother's Evil Empire, the legacy that not one but two baseball teams had to abandon New York for you to even exist, and the underlying feeling that things can't possibly get any worse. Well, sometimes they do. And sometimes you're on top of the world.
