This time of year is a tough one for so many in our neck of the woods. Yes, I realize there are folks around the country who read this, but the majority of our base is in the tri-state area. And we remember September 11, 2001, and the days that followed all too well.
For a 17-year-old kid who didn’t have class at Suffolk County Community College that sunny Tuesday morning, waking up to frantic friends screaming over our Nextel phones/two-way radios (yes, 2001 was funky as heck) to turn on the television was a shock in itself.
As those surreal events continued to unfold in front of our eyes over the course of the next minutes and hours, our initial reaction, of course, was an immediate and overwhelming rush of concern.
Concern for those thousands of regular people, like you and me, just sitting down for work but now suddenly trapped inside a living hell. Worry for the countless first responders who, as the duties of their chosen professions entailed, were running toward the devastation as opposed to away from it, putting their lives ahead of so many others, if even to save just a few. And, naturally, there was that unmistakable punch in the jaw of the newfound vulnerability of our nation as a whole.
The following days were even stranger. Every day you heard about a friend who lost someone in the attacks and grieved with them. Every time you turned on the news, a new wrinkle of the story was emerging. The confusion, anger, and mourning of an entire nation were palpable.
Then another news story came out. This was one of a more uplifting nature. Shea Stadium, home of our New York Mets, became a relief headquarters, of sorts. Manager Bobby Valentine became the unofficial goodwill ambassador, and the healing process, even in its most infant stages, began.
Lines of team allegiance evaporated quickly and without hesitation over those harrowing days. We were all on the same team. What was happening at Big Shea was happening all over the region, but Flushing set the bar and it was beautiful.
Back-burnered throughout this painstaking process was the fact that a baseball season still needed to be completed. By the time the Mets returned to the field in Pittsburgh on September 17, New York’s postseason hopes were all but dashed. But that didn’t matter one iota.
The sense of normalcy that the return of our pastime brought provided an inkling to why this game was created in the first place — to allow those who enjoy it to escape from their everyday lives, even for just a few hours, and lose themselves in the magic of baseball.
Under these circumstances, the need for that relief was magnified tenfold. When the Mets came home on September 21 to face Atlanta, that pent-up energy was on the precipice of combustion. Oddly, it took a little while for those in attendance to achieve that long-awaited rush of relief, but it came. And, oh, it came in force.
Mike Piazza, the Mets’ superstar and future Hall of Famer, cracked the tension in half with his majestic bomb into the dark Queens night. Howie Rose’s call — which is what most of us were left with in lieu of the electricity at Shea — more than sufficed in that regard.
For me, watching the game on our 13” RCA television in the garage, the sequence of events that played out induced tears. Like, puddles. It was bigger than baseball and you could feel it.
As the Mets’ season ended and the Yankees took center stage in the postseason, even the most ardent of Mets fans (maybe they won’t admit it) rooted for the pinstripes. Again, the strangest of times.
Twenty years later, the pain still exists. The overwhelming sense of loss doesn’t just linger. It punches you in the stomach. But, as we tend to do, we keep moving ahead, onward and upward, until that pain transforms into strength. Love…
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