Flash back for a moment to baseball’s bad old days. Six years ago this October, there was no World Series. The Fall Classic fell victim to baseball’s longest and bitterest labor dispute, a players strike precipitated by the owners’ illegal imposition of a salary cap. In spring training the following year, Reed, and about two dozen other current major leaguers, including teammate Benny Agbayani and injured Yankees outfielder Shane Spencer, crossed the picket line. In some places, that kind of action would earn you a pipe across the temple. It earned Reed, then a career minor leaguer with the Cincinnati Reds, a chance to play in a handful of sloppy scab games with high school coaches and vacuum cleaner salesmen. Five improbable years later, Reed was called upon to help salvage the season for the New York Mets.

“It’s not surprising that he’s playing,” said Marvin Miller, former executive director for the Major League Baseball Players Association, only moments before the first pitch. “What’s surprising is that nobody seems to care.” Indeed, with the assembled media horde gnawing on the bone of a 50-large fine issued to Clemens, the silence regarding Reed was deafening. Even Donald Fehr, Miller’s replacement, was diplomatic to a fault. “He’s a member of the club and Bobby [Valentine] chose to start him,” he said before the game. “We never say anything about who participates in games — ever.”

Miller is less circumspect. “It’s about values,” argues the man who helped end almost a century of indentured servitude for the players. “Once upon a time a scab was the lowest thing on earth. That’s no longer the case.” Indeed, it’s easy to see why Reed was put in the position to cross the picket line. While real prospects like the Yankees’ Derek Jeter were purposely isolated in minor league camps far from the front lines of baseball’s labor war, suspects like Reed were called in to help do the owners’ dirty work.

And on this night, the contrast with Reed’s mound rival couldn’t have been more striking. With his socks pulled high and his cap pulled low, Yankee starter Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez displays the throwback vibe and leonine grace of one who was born to the mound. He sports an improbable leg kick that a Rockette would envy, yet all the hitches and hesitations hold together aesthetically, and the result may be baseball’s postmodern pitching motion. Reed, on the other hand, has the body of a beer-league softball player poured into mercifully oversize double-knits. His motion is reminiscent of a lady shot-putter, all sweat and effort. Reed comes to a set, heaves the ball and hopes for the best.

And when the going got tough early, the entitlement gap seemed all the more obvious. Robin Ventura jacks a second-inning home run, and El Duque merely glances toward the royal blue outfield wall, then turns back to business abruptly. Asking the umpire for the ball, cleaning the rubber with his foot, tugging at his cap, he’s oblivious to the fireworks going off in the background, the Giant Big Apple below the scoreboard springing to life like Pee-wee Herman at a porn flick. “They don’t have this kind of horseshit in Cuba,” his indifference seems to say. He then proceeds to strike out the side. When you’ve worked for Fidel Castro, George Steinbrenner’s disapproval doesn’t faze you.

Reed, by contrast, is clearly half-full guy. After allowing a go-ahead triple to Paul O’Neill in the fourth, and then plunking Scott Brosius accidentally, he stomps around with obvious disgust. Even after he gets Vizcaino on strikes to end the inning, he mutters to himself on the way to the dugout, grimacing and grinding his gum.

But while Reed, who has struggled mightily this postseason, wouldn’t win any beauty contests, he kept the Mets close, scattering six hits and two runs, and pitching El Duque to a standoff. Reed’s chance at the win ended when Darryl Hamilton pinch-hit for him in the bottom of the sixth.

But this was to be a scab-powered night at Shea. In the bottom of the eighth, Agbayani, the Mets’ other “replacement,” laced an RBI double to knock El Duque out and give the Mets their first Series game win in 16 years.

“I don’t think the players understand the situation,” says Miller. “They want to be on a team that wins. If the scab proves to be an efficient player, they’re quick to forgive him.”

And that was the case Tuesday at Shea. The winning pitcher and main beneficiary of Reed’s persistence and Agbayani’s opportunism was reliever/union rep John Franco, who wears an orange Department of Sanitation T-shirt under his jersey in honor of his late father. Franco and his fellow union reps have voted year after year to deny Reed, Agbayani and the rest of the “replacements” (the scabs, not Paul Westerberg’s band) admission to the union, and the slice of marketing revenue and pension benefits that goes with it. But in the afterglow of his first World Series victory, any irony was completely lost on him.

“Rick Reed did a hell of a job tonight,” Franco beamed. “He went inning for inning with El Duque. We knew that Rick Reed was capable of pitching a game like that. He kept us in the game, gave our guys a chance to score runs. That’s what we ask of him.” And nothing more.

Why, then, am I literally drooling with anticipation? Because of the way I’ll eat afterward. Let me explain.

I will be the first to admit that “Top Chef” is a fundamentally flawed enterprise. Say what you will about “American Idol,” but the audience at home can hear Crystal Bowersox caterwauling just as well as Simon Cowell. On “Top Chef,” you get to watch frantic knife work, precise plating and maybe a little bickering around the walk-in, but you’ve got to rely on Judge Tom Colicchio and friends to tell you how the food on those elegant plates tasted. Indeed, the producers at Magical Elves edit the episodes with an eye toward maximum suspense rather than ultimate clarity. Midway through last season Laurine Wickett’s pork rillette was likened to cat food by one cranky judge, but she wasn’t canned that week, and another contestant was ordered to “pack up your knives and go” (PUYKAG, to faithful viewers). Which is why Colicchio and the other judges devote a substantial portion of their Bravo.com blogs to explaining/defending the outcomes.

To twist an adage often applied to music writing, watching “Top Chef” is a bit like smelling architecture.

But it’s still worth watching anyway — especially if, like me, you like to cook.

In a buzzworthy New York Times magazine piece last summer, food guru Michael Pollan slammed shows like “Top Chef” for turning cooking into a spectator sport. “Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia [Child] arrived on our television screens,” he argued. “It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of ‘Top Chef’ or ‘Chopped’ or ‘The Next Food Network Star.’ What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.”

While Pollan is right about most things foodly, I fear he’s missed the mark this time. Like most home chefs, I’ve got a kitchen full of cookbooks and a growing trove of Internet resources. I don’t need instruction, I need inspiration.

And more than anything, watching “Top Chef” gets me hungry. And when I’m hungry, I want to cook. After the cheftestants struggle through a Quickfire Challenge, I’ll steal off to the kitchen during a commercial break to whip up a curried aioli. Or a Meyer lemon marinade. Or a pancetta omelet. This watch/cook, watch/cook ritual is repeated week after week, all season long. Contrary to Pollan’s thesis, I spend more quality time in the kitchen during “Top Chef” than any other time of the year.

Sometimes the show’s inspiration is pretty general. During last season’s Restaurant Wars, I filled the fridge with everything from spunky goat cheese crepes to postmodern baked beans enlivened with Guinness and 70 percent Lindt dark chocolate. Other times, it’s quite specific, like the time I channeled Mike Voltaggio’s audacious — but ultimately disastrous — egg concoction. I scratched my head, fondled a fresh free-range egg laid that morning by a spunky, young hen named Clover, and deconstructed it, sunny side up. (Separate the egg, scramble the white curd-free with creme fraiche in the style of Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and top the scrambled white with the lightly poached yolk.)

Therein lies the appeal of “Top Chef.” Unlike the contestants on, say, “The Next Food Network Star,” who seem chosen largely for their ability to smile and stir at the same time, the men and women vying for supremacy can flat-out cook. Even those sterling regional chefs who inevitably get PUYKAG’d before the finals — like Ariane Duarte, from my hometown of Montclair, N.J., ushered off midway through Season 6 — make food that’ll challenge your mind as well as your taste buds. And unlike the one-off contestants of “Chopped” and “Iron Chef,” or even the competing-for-charity virtuosos of the recently concluded “Top Chef Masters,” there’s something serious at stake for the cooks of “Top Chef”: The juice from winning the title or coming close can make a career, and I know from experience that desperation can be a key ingredient in a successful dish.

Sure, I’d like to see telestratored super slo-mo replays of the knife work. Or a primer on trussing a chicken that goes into half as much detail as this You Tube video on inguinal hernia repair. And I’d like to know more about how the contestants assemble their flavor profiles and less about who’s doin’ what to/with whom (see the Season 2 hazing of Marcel Vigneron by Cliff Crooks and friends, and the Season 5 dalliance between Leah Cohen and eventual champ Hosea Rosenberg). The food is interesting enough.

There are indications that this season, like last, might offer more of the right kind of heat. Xie Xie’s Angelo Sosa has cooked with heavyweights like Jean-Georges and Alain Ducasse, while Ed Cotton of Plein Sud has opened restaurants for Daniel Boulud, and Kevin Sbraga is a protégé of Jose Garces. The fact that snarkmeister Toby Young will be replaced at the judges table by the peerless Eric Ripert of Le Bernadin fame is another hopeful sign.

I know that “Top Chef” is bound to fall back on its reality-show tropes, from simmering feuds between the chefs (“You’re not my mother!”) to stunt cooking challenges (alligator, anyone?) to episodes that pay lip service to this season’s Washington, D.C., location (“Your challenge is to create a truly bi-partisan brunch … using only red and blue foods”). But strip away these made-for-TV trappings and you have a show that does something rather remarkable: It sparks the imagination. So program the DVR, sharpen the Shun santoku, and head into the kitchen to make something that’s worth eating. I’m getting hungry already.

I google Ms. Ott. She is not Shaun White’s birth mother. She did have all her stuff stolen out of a van last week, including her lucky game-worn $299 Balance Plus Delux curling shoes. Who leaves stuff in a van in Vancouver? She was curling in a tight new pair of shoes and without a GPS unit. They seem to have stolen her mojo, too.

There will be no front side Double Spin Doctor and no trip to the White House for Ms. Ott. She slides the big old rock. She misses all the other rocks. She hurls the big ol’ rock again. She misses again. The Chinese score like four points off this last screw up, which is a lot in curling or so I’m led to believe. Ms. Ott concedes. Concedes. The bronze medal. Concedes. Still, I feel bad for her, looking like Shaun White, choking in the clutch, while some Vancouver junkie tries in vain to sell her shoes for $10.

I am such a geek.

Access Hollywood is over, along with its montage of Maria Menonous playing hockey and Billy Bush flirting with Katarina Witt. It’s NBC Olympics prime time. On tap: bobsled, Lindsey Vonn, and Apolo Ohno.

And thankfully, no figure skating, if you ignore a very special interview with Joannie Rochette.

“Is he the coach?” Emma asks when USA 1 bobsled pilot Steve Holcomb is interviewed. He is very cool, in a King of Queens kind of way. He couldn’t beat the women curlers in a footrace. His speed suit is stuffed tighter than a natural casing vendor pack Sabrett hot dog.  And he speaks in clichés. “Play ‘em one run at a time…just trying to help out the team…god willing.” Who needs Nuke LaLoosh?

I have a new favorite Olympian. Until the second run, when he does the Holcy Dance. The less said about that the better.

“Are they going to win or crash?” Emma wonders. The St. John Family has NBC figured out. Every live-on-tape segment of this Olympiad, whether it’s bobsled or ski racing or speed skating, is edited the same way. The contenders come down, one sets a fast time, someone else, preferably an American beats it. Then there’s the 39-year old Swede in the start house. Could he win a gold medal?

Or could he get medivac’d out after a crash that would make Vinko Bogataj wince?

This is the question we ask as the Russian sled gets ready to rumble.

Bobsled doesn’t work on television. The sleds blur by in an Eistensteinian montage, left to right, right to left, head on without rhyme or reason. It’s like playing a video game where you keep hitting the wrong button and changing the POV by accident. Color guy John Morgan makes up for it by yelling at the top of his lungs, but it makes my headache worse.

The Russian sled is pretty fast, but not gold medal fast, so I’ve got a bad feeling as he enters the dreaded 50/50 curve—wasn’t it only 10 days ago that a man was killed here? Sure enough the sled reaches its tipping point, flips over, and a ton of shiny metal and angry Russians hurtle down the ice at speeds that would cost you four points on your license in any state but Nevada. “He walked away with a football player mentality,” says Morgan. Big crash, no injuries, America’s leading and all is right with the world.

I am about to tell you why bobsled is better than figure skating. Crashes count.

In bobsled, the Russian pilot flips upside down, and that marks the end of his Olympic experience, unless you count the instant replays. In skiing, Lindsey Vonn falls, and she’s done. In short track speed skating, the two Korean guys fall and you can stick a fork in them. Not so in figure skating. You can fall on a triple salchow, get up, fall on a triple toe loop, get up againt and then complete the trifecta by falling on a triple flip. You can clean the ice like a sequined Zamboni, and you’re allowed to continue, while Sandra Bezic talks about the elegance of your footwork and the intricate beauty of your musical interpretation. And not just continue, but actually contend for a medal. Skating’s enlightened scoring system seems to treat the Human Zamboni routine just about the same as a triple jump that’s under-rotated by an eighth of a revolution. Sure the women’s long program beat American Idol in the ratings. That’s because no one can tell the difference.

A sportswriter friend of mine is in Vancouver. He is not particularly happy about this. He would, no joke, rather be back home covering the NJ Nets in their deathless struggle to get to six wins. Yesterday morning sent me an e-mail. He was watching Elena Glebova of Estonia do her long program and needed to share.

“She just fell on her ass. I laughed out loud and 6,000 people tut-tutted me.” (The fall is 3:20 into this clip.)

Another journalist friend quipped back.

“In my vast past experience covering Olympic women’s figure skating finals (too many), I always found that the most fun is to be had shouting “Down goes Frazier!” every time another ass hits the ice.”

When I read that, I spit orange juice through my nose.

As for the women’s slalom, let’s cut to the chase. Lindsey Vonn misses a gate. Ouch. But she stays around to root for her German friend, Maria Reisch. Awww. That said, I’m pretty impressed by the telestrator work of Christin Cooper. She shows how one of the skiers clears a gate imprecisely and the pole falls right onto her ski and wobbles the tip. Sweet. Yes, I’m a geek.

A rare moment of honesty from NBC. Something important happened in the plain old regular speedskating. The Americans are skating against the Dutch for a place in the team pursuit finals. With no prospect for crashes or tears, the producers see all of America flipping to FOX en masse. So Dan Hicks and Dan Jansen fess up. And I paraphrase. “Okay, people, there’s something to watch here. Really. We win. The United States. We beat the Dutch guy, who got knee capped by his coach. The American’s going to stick his tongue out. Don’t change the channel. Please. And don’t forget Joannie Rochette is coming up soon and you don’t want to miss her.”

And then there’s Apolo Anton Ohno. Words fail me. What exactly do we call that thing that sits below his lip. It’s not a soul patch. It’s not a goatee. And even more frightening, I resort to Google. No one has yet named this thing. Really. In honor of Mr. Ohno’s Olympic run, I, too, have grown a soul patch on steroids, but I don’t know what to call it either. So, please, in the name of all that is decent and right, let’s name Apolo’s facial hair. That’s what the comments page is for.

As for Apolo’s last race, he’s behind. He pushes the guy. He hopes to get away with it. He doesn’t. “It was more like a cushion,” he tells Chris Collinsworth. Having laid this groundwork and smiled his boyish smile, he goes after the Canadian judge who DQ’d him. “That’s the head Canadian ref, and we’re on Canadian soil…”

I realize this may be the last time we see Mr. Ohno and his enigmatic facial hair in an individual Olympic race. I wonder what lies ahead for this great champion. Shifting blame. Lying with conviction. Raising the specter of conspiracy. He’ll be a very good CEO someday. Unless he decides to go into rock and roll. I can see it now: The Plastic Ohno Band. Maybe his dad, Yuki Ohno…oh forget about it. I am such a geek.

Being a Rickey Henderson fan is a guilty pleasure in itself. Friends — smart baseball fans, some even baseball writers — view any mention of my Rickey Watch as an open invitation to trash him. “He is the biggest jerk,” goes the chorus. No, it’s not personal — he didn’t refuse to sign an autograph or blow off an interview. It’s simply a style thing: ’80s retro notwithstanding the snatch catches, the wraparound sunglasses, his “I am the greatest of all time” speech, they simply rub people the wrong way.

But as Ty Cobb — or was it Freud? — once said, “It ain’t braggin’ if you can back it up.” Say what you will about Henderson’s ‘tude, he walks the walk. When he burst onto the scene with the Oakland A’s in ’79 (around the time that Bill James earned a place beside Henry James on my bookshelf), he was the epitome of the postmodern baseball player. His genius was subtle, and to appreciate it took an aficionado’s eye — it was the baseball equivalent of touting Tobe Hooper as an auteur. Henderson’s batting average may be average (.280 career), but look at that .403 on-base percentage. Sure he steals bases (1,395 to date) better than anyone ever, but he’d be a Hall of Famer without a single sack swiped. He was, inarguably, the best leadoff man ever, and I didn’t have to read about him in Total Baseball, I could watch him on the Game of the Week. The Ali-like swagger was merely a bonus.

And for a little while, I got to see Henderson every day, his rock-solid physique poured into skintight Yankee pinstripes in a way that surely made Joe DiMaggio blush. I relished the way he worked a pitcher, sinking into his Eddie Gaedel crouch, shrinking further as the high fastball approached the plate. And then, inevitably, the desperate pitcher would lay in a 3-0 fastball, and Rickey would uncoil and drive the ball into the left center field bleachers. Four pitches, 1-0. And the Rickey Rally — a walk, two stolen bases and a sacrifice fly — was purist baseball at its best. Scoring runs, after all, is baseball’s bottom line, and no one’s better at it than Rickey Henderson.

In 1985, playing for the Yankees, he had one of the great seasons in baseball history, scoring 146 runs in 143 games. And then he lost the MVP to the guy who drove him in, the paler and more palatable Don Mattingly. When Henderson moved on to Oakland, Toronto and points west, I dutifully followed his exploits in the morning’s box scores.

His stay at Shea? It wasn’t an easy time to be a Henderson fan. The sports-talk callers were ready to burn him in effigy for allegedly playing cards in the Mets clubhouse with Bobby Bonilla after he was lifted from Game 6 of the 1999 National League Championship Series. Everyone seemed to forget that the Mets wouldn’t have even made the postseason sans Henderson. Then early the next spring, Rickey broke into a home run trot only to have the ball bounce off the wall. Rickey got no further than first. “I hit it out, but it didn’t go out,” he said sheepishly, only hours before he got his walking papers.

That goes with the territory. Ruth drank. Cobb was a virulent racist. Henderson marches to the beat of his own inner Elvin Jones. Rickey talks to himself. (“That’s not how Rickey swings.”) He talks to his bats. (“Which one of you bad boys got some hits in you?”) He talks about himself in the third person. (“This is Rickey calling on behalf of Rickey.”) Hell, he even throws left and bats right.

Indeed, Henderson has become something of a fin-de-millennium Yogi Berra. During his first go-round with the San Diego Padres, he was looking for a seat on the team bus and teammate Steve Finley said, “Sit anywhere you want, you got tenure.”

“Ten years? What are you talking about? Rickey got 16, 17 years.” The bus broke up.

Another Rickey story. When he hooked up with the Seattle Mariners last year, Rickey is said to have approached John Olerud, who had once suffered a brain aneurysm, and asked about his unusual practice of wearing a batting helmet in the field. Henderson says, “I used to play with a dude in New York who did the same thing.”

“That was me,” said Olerud, who was Henderson’s teammate with both the Mets and the Blue Jays. Good story. Widely reported. And completely untrue — concocted by a visiting player who had run out of hot-foot victims.

But apocryphal or not, it’s the kind of incident that Henderson’s critics cite as proof of his stupidity or his self-absorption. “How on earth Rickey Henderson sustained such a tremendous career,” added one Internet critic, as a footnote to the Olerud fable, “while acting like the self-centered idiot that he is, I have no idea.”

So maybe it’s for the best that, at 42, Rickey’s playing out the string quietly, chasing ghosts in silence. Earlier this year, after starting the season in AAA, Rickey broke the career record for walks, the last career mark held by Babe Ruth. Think about that. Rickey has. “Ahhh, that’s something, that’s a really big record,” he told me a few years back. “As a leadoff hitter and a guy who steals bases and creates stuff on the base paths, really I don’t think I’m supposed to be in that category. Most of them that are getting all the walks are the big power hitters, the big home run hitters.” Walk Ruth? Sure. Grover Cleveland did just that with a one-run lead in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the 1926 World Series. And Ruth killed the Yankees’ chances by getting thrown out trying to steal second. But walk the game’s greatest base stealer? Most pitchers would rather get traded to Milwaukee. But walk him they do — 2,141 times and counting.

And as the season wound to a close, Rickey Henley Henderson found himself oh-so-close to both 3,000 hits (in itself a virtual invite to Cooperstown) and Cobb’s runs record, a mark that eluded Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Hank Aaron and Pete Rose. The biggest Henderson headlines of the summer came in late August when Milwaukee manager Davey Lopes (a former Henderson teammate) ran out to second base and confronted Henderson after Rickey had stolen second in the seventh inning with the Padres up 12-5. “Stay in the game you’re going down,” fumed Lopes. “We’re old school,” Lopes said later, ignoring the fact that he had done the same thing in exactly the same situation seven times in his career. “There are some things you just don’t do.”

Caught between the old school and the new, embraced by neither, it makes perverse sense that as Henderson approached a 73-year-old milestone, the nation’s attention was focused elsewhere. On Cal Ripken Jr’s farewell tour. Or Tony Gwynn’s. Or Barry Bonds’ home run chase. Or recent national events. When Henderson tied Cobb on Thursday, Sports Center buried the story behind Bonds’ failing to tie the home run record and Roy Oswalt’s groin injury, and the feat merited but a single joke (“One more run and he gets a salad named after him.” Get it? Cobb salad?). And coming on the same night as Bonds’ 70th homer, Rickey’s record-breaker was again an afterthought. Ditto for his 3,000th hit on Sunday, overshadowed by another Bonds dinger, and Gwynn’s swan song.

But it works for me. Rickey Watch has always been a solitary diversion, a cyber-vigil for one of the handful of players in the big leagues older than me. And as I watched him, live on tape, slide into home after the record-breaking home run, and lift the gold-plated commemorative bag over his head, I remembered a day at Yankee Stadium a few years ago, with Rickey in town with the A’s. The Rickey-o-meter stood at exactly 2,000 then, and I discovered that my suspicions were correct — I was not alone among the faithful. “Ten years ago, when I was asked the question, ‘What’s the most important thing for you to do?’ I always said scoring runs,” explained Rickey with uncharacteristic seriousness. “A leadoff hitter’s job is to come across the plate.” No joking, no jaking, no jerking around, I could see in Rickey’s eyes that he still had a score to settle. “You have a vision,” he said, picturing the specter of Ty Cobb as clearly as Haley Joel Osment saw dead people. “He’s in front of you. You can see it.” I could too now as I watched 2,244 change to 2,245 and then to 2,246 and beyond.

And sure, while I like a good crash — one that ends with a driver strolling away from a mangled hunk of wreckage — as much as the next guy, I’ve really come to appreciate the sheer improbability of keeping a car on the track. I was once chauffeured on a couple of hot laps by former world champion Emerson Fittipaldi. As my fellow journalists held on to their seats and their lunches for dear life, I watched with rapt attention as he finessed the throttle, tapped the brakes and danced on the fine line where friction kept centrifugal force at bay. All while entropy — in the form of a punctured tire, a spot of oil on the track or another driver trying to occupy the same space at the same time — threatened to throw this delicate equation out of balance.

And then came that decisive moment when it seemed that the car was going too fast, the road was too narrow, the wall too near. But Emmo’s cool. The wheel shimmies, the car slides, the line changes, and as surely as Nicolas Cage can dodge a fusillade of semi-automatic fire and secure the chemical weapons, disaster is averted. Whether you watch it from trackside or feel it through the seat of your pants, this dance with disarray is as beautiful and life-affirming as anything that Balanchine ever created.

But I guess my attachment to this cruel sport goes deeper than my adrenal glands. Sad to say, but auto racing taught me about death. Even before I hit puberty I learned that Great Moments in Auto Racing had its dark side. During fifth-grade geography class I buried my head in Jackie Stewart’s autobiography, “Faster.” Again and again, I followed him from funeral to funeral, and hoped against hope that the slow Italian ambulance would somehow get his friend Jochen Rindt to the hospital on time.

And before long, I became one of the bereaved. Almost three decades later I can still see Roger Williamson’s March, upside down and on fire in a Dutch sand dune, and Williamson’s friend David Purley struggling in vain to flip the burning car over. Or Mario Andretti, only hours after fulfilling a lifelong dream by winning the world championship, heading to the hospital to find out that his friend and teammate Ronnie Peterson suffered not only a broken leg but burns to his lungs as well. Or the time that Gilles Villeneuve, spurred by his rivalry with his teammate, headed out for one last hellacious qualifying lap, only to come upon a blind corner and a slow car.

No, I never met any of these men, but I felt each loss as profoundly as if it were my dog or my Uncle Mike. Every solemn headline, every tragic videotape was followed by real tears and the rest of the Kubler-Ross routine. No, I don’t recommend this as a rite of passage — auto racing therapy? I think not. And all things considered, I’ll probably be happier if my own son becomes a WWF fan. But all those sad and beautiful moments, those early lessons about how life is precious and fragile and random and unfair, they made me a different person. And, even on a day as dark as today, I’d like to think a better one.

As Yankees manager Joe Torre secured his three-peat, and fourth title overall, he could have been excused for wondering if a “thank you” note was in order and whom he should send it to: Leiter? Valentine? Or the most beneficent of all, closer Armando Benitez, who gift-wrapped Game 1.

Indeed, for all the invective that surrounded the Subway Series, the Mets were exemplary hosts. Perhaps it stemmed from an inferiority complex — Shea Stadium is, after all, the architectural equivalent of a Ford Pinto, festooned with neon sculptures that would be right at home in any better shopping mall. Unlike the ballpark in the Bronx, the wrecking ball is on the way for Shea: The only question is how soon.

But while New York’s tabloids and the sports talk shows have made the Subway Series out to be baseball’s version of the Bloods and the Crips, the reality is both calmer and more complex.

The deciding game, for example, began with a hear-it-to-believe-it moment. A group of crosstown visitors began to chant, “Let’s go Yankees.” The fans in black responded, “Let’s go Mets.”

“Let’s go Yankees.”
“Let’s go Mets.”
“Let’s go Yankees.”
“Let’s go Mets.”

No one stepped on anyone’s lines, and the result was call-and-response harmony that would play on Broadway.

The amazing thing, of course, is how many Yankee fans made it out to Flushing in the first place, all wearing their colors proudly. After five years of playoff baseball, Yankee fans have learned how to finesse the ticket system and they made themselves right at home. In Game 3, they actually posted K signs for every El Duque strikeout — something that George Steinbrenner would never allow in the House That Ruth Built.

The regular-season Shea faithful are one of baseball’s toughest crowds — they booed All-World catcher Mike Piazza mercilessly for months after his arrival, and all but succeeded in driving the franchise’s best player ever right out of town. But except for a couple of guys who kept shouting “You suck” to reserve Yankees outfielder Luis Polonia, those leather-lunged die-hards didn’t have the scratch or the juice to make life miserable for the Yankee faithful. The Mets fans who were able to score Subway Series tickets were largely quiet, well-behaved and well-connected.

In the seventh inning, when the crowd briefly chanted “Yank-ees Suck” as Yanks starter Andy Pettitte quelled yet another Met rally, the effect was far more cute than menacing.

Even Keith Hernandez, the spiritual leader of the ’86 Mets championship team, noticed the change in his old stomping grounds. “It’s so corporate,” he said before the game. “And so quiet.” The fans, at least.

Whatever the paying patrons may have lacked in volume, Shea’s turbocharged P.A. system more than compensated for. The sound pressure during a particularly rousing call to arms reached an ear-shattering 102 decibels. That’s more than twice as loud as OSHA standards for, say, a boiler factory.

Indeed, after Mariano Rivera recorded the final out — Piazza obligingly hit an ICBM right at a waiting Bernie Williams — and the postgame celebration began, the Yankees’ only taunt seemed aimed at the public address system.

As the first bottles of Korbel and Mumm Cordon Rouge were cracked, shaken and sprayed, Denny Neagle, Clay Bellinger and Jeff Nelson let loose an ear-piercing howl and warbled an off-key version of “Who Let the Dogs Out,” the Baha Men anthem that became this summer’s rallying cry at Shea. Warren Zevon would be proud.

Over in the other corner of the crowded visitors clubhouse, which only 24 hours before had been under a foot of water when a standpipe broke, a conciliatory Steinbrenner held court.

“The Mets, their fans, I was told, ‘You’d better be careful going out there, they’re going to rake you over the coals,’” he exclaimed. “They never treated me with anything but courtesy. They have great fans. I don’t understand all this thing about all this security. I walked into the ballpark alone today.

“They’re a great team,” added the Boss, his malaprop catching the pulse of the first post-millennial Subway Series. “They gave us everything we wanted.”