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Meet the Mets! Tom root, root, roots for the home team!

By Tom Allon

It is starting to feel a lot like 1969. Or 1973. Or 1986. Or even 2000, for many New York Mets fans, as a fast start reminded us of those glory years for New York’s junior baseball team.

Boy, was April a lot of fun. It appears that the long, methodical rebuilding plan of the last five years is about to bear some sweet fruit. The emergence of Matt Harvey as the most dominant pitcher in baseball — much like Tom Seaver in the late 1960s and ’70s and Dwight Gooden in the mid-1980s — has given the Mets a true superstar to build a team around.

Harvey is one of those matinee idol-like stars — good looks, rugged personality, macho charisma — who can light up the whole city. He had a big setback two years ago after a meteoric start to his career — a crippling shoulder injury that required surgery and a 16-month rehab. His lightning fastball and amazing control would surely be affected, many fans feared. But so far, the undefeated pitcher has been almost flawless.

I have been a Mets fan for more than four decades and it has not always been easy to root for a team that has had so many long periods of drought between a few fertile years. The Mets were born the same year I was, 1962, and their early years were marked by ineptitude so bad that the legendary manager Casey Stengel once said: “Can’t anyone around here play this game?

Until 1968, Stengel was absolutely right. But then a wise, patient manager named Gil Hodges, a former Brooklyn Dodger great, assembled a workmanlike team around a scintillating pitching staff led by another charismatic ace: Tom Seaver. A transplanted University of Southern California grad, “Tom Terrific” lifted his teammates and led them to the promised land in 1969 with an improbable World Series victory over the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles.

The team from Flushing was dubbed the “Amazin’ Mets” for their odds-defying championship.

By October 1969, a team no one thought had a chance, had 100 victories in the regular season and then went on to mow down the Atlanta Braves and Orioles on its way to a ticker-tape parade through downtown Manhattan.

There were a few other notable years since, particularly 1973, when eccentric relief pitcher Tug McGraw coined a phrase for the ages: “Ya Gotta Believe,” and help lead a middling team to a World Series berth.

Then, in 1986, 17 years after its first season of glory, a collection of veteran stars including Gary Carter and Keith Hernandez led a team of virtual no-names, who were catapulted by a young, flame-throwing pitching staff led by Dwight Gooden and Ron Darling, two aces who could not have come from more different backgrounds. But that whole team came together that year to produce another Amazin’ season in Flushing and victory in one of the most memorable World Series battles ever against the snake-bit Boston Red Sox. A slow bouncing ball that went through the legs of first baseman Bill Buckner seemed like a gift from the baseball deities that allowed the Amazin’s to once again deliver some joy again in Metsville.

In 2000, there was a disappointing loss to the Yankees in the first Subway Series since the Bombers beat the Dodgers in 1956. Then it has been a long journey in the losing wilderness among baseball’s bottom-dwelling teams. The team got a new stadium in 2009, CitiField, and brought in general manager Sandy Alderson and manager Terry Collins, whose methodical moves (helped somewhat by the previous GM Omar Minaya) has now put the Mets in contention.

With outstanding pitching led by Harvey, Jacob deGrom, Bartolo Colon, and Jonathan Niese; rising stars in center field with Juan Lagares and at catcher with Travis D’Arnaud; and a steady superstar at third base in David Wright, the team is so deep that even when Wright, D’Arnaud, starting pitcher Zach Wheeler and hot reliever Jeremy Blevin went down with injuries, the team still managed to skyrocket out of the gate by winning 14 of its first 19 games.

It’s amazing how a successful sports team can lift our collective spirits in this city, how the Amazin’s in Queens can make this overgrown fan obsessively check ESPN each day for the latest box score and standings.

Finally, we’ll get ’em next year, is here this year.

Ya gotta believe!