This is Next Year by Pete Hamill

As a native New Yorker, I grew up as a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers and that childhood allegiance stamped me forever with the brand of the National League. When the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn in 1957, I did not switch my loyalty to the New York Yankees. Like most Brooklynites, and much of the United States, I despised the Yankees. They won so often and so easily, particularly in the World Series, that they were boring in their triumphs. They always seemed to beat our Dodgers (the exception was 1955) and our slogan became “Wait ‘til next year”. Victory, for the Yankees, was mechanical and cold. They were too perfect. And that perfection gave them a certain swaggering arrogance. As someone once said, rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for United States Steel.

After the departure of the Yankees I didn’t go to another baseball game for more than ten years. Like millions of others, I had vowed that I would never again have my heart broken by a baseball team. When at last I surrendered to the old longing for green grass on summer afternoons, I naturally went to Shea Stadium to root for the New York Mets, a National League expansion team created to fill the void left by the Dodgers and Giants. The Mets weren’t much of a team, but they played National League baseball, hard hit-and-run baseball, baseball that required that you get your uniform dirty. And they were not the Yankees.

The Mets had some great seasons, and won some championships, but then entered a long decline. In the 1990s, New Yorkers – particularly the new immigrants, who had no memory of the bitter past -- were attracted again to the New York Yankees, with a passion that wasn’t there in the glory days of the 1950s. I couldn’t blame them. Joe Torre, the Yankee manager, had a National League face: lumpy, beaten up, with patient intelligent eyes. He had played most of his career in the National League and had even managed the Mets for a few dismal seasons. Torre had some former Mets on the team, including David Cone and Darryl Strawberry, and his assistant, Don Zimmer, was an old Brooklyn Dodger. And he had some wonderful players, from Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams to the pitcher David Wells, who definitely looked like a National League player, more out of shape than many of the fans. Most important, Torre had them play National League baseball, running and hitting and scrambling to victory. Under Torre, the Yankees became the greatest team in baseball.

But then the Mets began to play good baseball in their park in Queens. Bobby Valentine was now the manager, with his own pouchy National League face. The team had some wonderful young players: John Olerud at first base, the shortstop Rey Ordonez, the catcher Mike Piazza, the third baseman Robin Ventura, along with such veterans as John Franco, Shawon Dunstan, Rickey Henderson, along with pitchers Al Leiter and Armando Benitez. Last year, they made a great run to get into the playoffs, and for the first time since the 1950s, New York was thrilled by the prospect of a Subway Series. And that meant that old fans would have to choose: you could be for the Mets, and the National League, or the Yankees, and the American League. As much as I cherished Torre, my heart went finally to the Mets.

We know what happened. The Mets played the Atlanta Braves, got knocked down, got up, got knocked down again, and got up, and kept getting up until their pitcher Kenny Rogers walked in the winning run in the 11th inning of the sixth game. It was over. The Braves had won four games of the playoff series and went on to destruction at the hands of the Yankees.

But even in defeat, the Mets remained the heroes of a great part of New York. The next day’s New York Post ran the oldest of headlines: WAIT ‘TIL NEXT YEAR. And that, of course, is always the greatest lesson that sports can teach us. There are very few winners in this world; all of us, in some ways, will lose more often than we win. But sports can teach us what to do with defeat. We can’t whine with excuses. We can’t consume ourselves with bitterness, or make vows of revenge. We sit in our own versions of the loser’s locker room, and we examine what happened, and the mistakes we made, and then say to ourselves: All right, wait ‘til next year. Or as we used to say in Brooklyn, this is next year. And it is: with only a few months left until spring training, and then the long season, and then the slanting light of October. This is next year. I can feel it in my bones. Next year for all of us.