Last night, I went to a talk at the Fairfield Museum and History Center given by author Dana Brand. The Fairfield Museum has an exhibition on the history of baseball in Connecticut, from the 19th century through to recent players in the big leagues. Connecticut also happens to hold pockets of fans for three different major league teams: New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox and finally, the New York Mets.

Brand’s talk, of course, was on the last of those three groups, though not limited to those in Connecticut. He read excerpts from both of his book Mets Fan and his newest book The Last Days of Shea: Delight and Despair in the Life of a Mets Fan, and from both one can clearly see that Brand is not just a reporter of history, but one of those fans that loves the team from Flushing Meadow.

While Brand respects the Yankees, and their “monotony of dominance” he finds and puts words to something so wonderful about being a fan of one of the other 29 teams. In The Last Days of Shea, his book about those seasons where the Mets were so good and so disappointing at the same time, and finally the closing of Shea.

Yankee fans don’t understand a love for a team other than the Yankees. Even those that lived through the bleak periods of the early 1970s and the late 1980s. Yankee fans must be built with short memories, that’s all I can say. They don’t hold onto those days of losing to justify their winning. They simply hold on to the winning. Other teams fans actually relish those close calls, if they have been followed by some very shiny bright spot. That curveball that Carlos Beltran watched pass by would be a badge of honor, if the following season all that promise had been fulfilled. As Brand writes hoping and dreaming “are a pleasure, even if you never get what you want. To hope and dream, you need the idea of success, but you don’t need the success itself.”

I have often said we go to a game for the same reason that we go to a movie or the theater. We are going to be taking on a journey. Unlike in a play though, we don’t know where the story will go in the course of one game. Will we leave exalted or emotionally defeated? But we come day in and day out to feel things strongly, passionately and completely. And yes, I believe, Yankee fans feel those things too, they just control the range a little better than the rest of us.

This season though, as Brand pointed out during his talk, Mets fans have lost that sense of hope. They have lost that pride that comes with being the underdog in a city with that other type of team- the one that doesn’t know underdog status. I am going to answer Brand’s query here though and argue that perhaps for those fans of those other 29 teams, the satisfaction that comes with coming close and not winning it all is only valuable if, after the false starts, you do actually feel the glory of the light shining on your team. Perhaps that curveball crossing in front of Carlos Beltran made each Mets fans feel that this was the penance that had to be paid in order to go through another season and actually get to the World Series. And now, those same fans see that most likely that will not happen. They feel defeated in a way that they could not when the St. Louis Cardinals were jumping up and down on their field. The promise of that success had taken a hold of them, and they no longer can grasp the idea that hope is as beautiful a thing unto itself. It will come back. It may not be back next year though. And for that those that own the Mets should be worried.

Brand does a beautiful job of describing the culture of Shea Stadium, and what it meant to sit in those seats with other fans. His description of what it meant to enter Shea, and its labyrinth of ramps and escalators that were the height of modernity in 1962, and felt somewhat soulless after the millenium, is brilliant as is his description of that last game at Shea. The Mets didn’t have a captain to ask fans to bring their memories to the new stadium (in fact ownership forgot how important those memories actually were.) All Mets fans had was their past stars fading beyond the centerfield fence.

In case you can’t guess, I highly recommend The Last Days at Shea for any Mets fan you know. If they sat in those seats, they will read Brand’s words and smile. It was good to be a Met fan in those seats- even if the food was lousy and the ushers were grumpy. Mets fans just have to remember that good days will come again, someday.