The Mets have given fans another reason to dream

It’s okay to dream now. It is. It’s okay to play little games in your head, connecting dots and conjuring up best-case scenarios. It’s okay to feel good about Sean Manaea against a bullpen game with the Dodgers in Game 6, especially after how it went last time. And of course: It’s okay to think carefully about what might happen afterwards.

It’s okay. It is. The Mets have given you so much. On Friday, the Mets proved they wanted to get back on the plane to Los Angeles just as much as you did. Pete Alonso’s blast in the first inning started the party. Six solid outs by Edwin Diaz ended the game.

In between, a brigade of Mets provided every big hit missing in the last two games. There was definitely a little drama, because the Dodgers are relentless and the Mets can always reliably give you a little more stress than you’d like. But every time they got closer, the Mets got further away.

In the end it was 12 for the Mets and 6 for the Dodgers.

In the end, there were 43,841 true believers who started the day singing “My Girl” along with the real Temptations and then hummed it with “Meet the Mets,” knowing there would be more baseball in LA on Sunday night have already dreamed, of course, and why not? The Mets are back in the game. You’re back in the picture.

It’s okay to dream. It is.

“We’ve been facing elimination for a month,” said Diaz, who retired six of the seven Dodgers to face him, including the fearsome troika of Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman. “We had to do our job. We did our job.”

That’s what they did. Now they have at least two more days of baseball season. Five days after the Dodgers’ Jack Flaherty made the Mets look like a JV team and suffocated them over seven innings in Game 1, the Mets struck out Flaherty, finished him off and took a 3-0, 8-1 lead.

It all started with David Peterson. Facing second and third, with no one out and many of the fans not yet sipping their opening beers, he got a big break when Ohtani inexplicably failed to get short on Teoscar Hernandez’s grounder.

The Dodgers had been on the verge of silencing the crowd early for the third game in a row, but now Freeman hit a laser that landed in Alonso’s glove and Peterson fanned Tommy Edman, who had been a rock in the shoe the entire series Mets was. The crowd erupted. The Mets were still breathing.

“Focus on executing one pitch at a time,” Peterson said. He would tire later and not make it to the bottom of the fourth, but with those eight pitches that slammed the door on the Dodgers in the first inning, he had done his part. “It’s a privilege and an honor to get the ball in situations like this. I never take that for granted.”

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A few minutes later Alonso fired one into orbit and when it landed it was 3-0. The Mets were determined to get on a plane to get to their scheduled practice Saturday afternoon. They were determined to keep this crazy story going. And it goes on.

“It changed the mood in the dugout to see what Pete does best,” said Francisco Lindor, who was previously seen on the video board singing along to the Temps to the crowd’s overwhelming delight and who picked Flaherty to do the Setting the table for Alonso. He had vowed that the Mets would not go easy on Thursday.

On Friday he helped make it happen.

“We have to believe in each other,” he said. “You have to believe in what is happening here. If you don’t believe, you shouldn’t be here.”

The Mets believed so. The crowd believed and kept the decibel level at 11, even as they reached for the Rolaids in their pockets for a few moments, even as Andy Pages continued to fire rocket shots over the left field wall.

(Dodgers who have hit two home runs in a postseason game: Duke Snider, twice; and Andy Pages. That’s all. That’s the list.)

Carlos Mendoza made two key lineup changes that paid off: Jesse Winker reached base three times, scored three runs and delivered an RBI triple that nearly caused Citi to drown out the planes landing next door at LaGuardia. Jeff McNeil had two RBIs on two sac flies, the second of which had the ballpark exhaling after Mookie Betts hit Ryne Stanek with a home run to cut the Mets’ lead to 10-6.

And, oh yeah: The kid Mendoza was with, Francisco Alvarez, had three hits and an RBI, which means four hits for him, since some – your humble narrator at the top of this line – had suggested he take a seat .

“We have momentum,” Alvarez said. “You can feel it.”

Of course you can. The Mets get another flight. They get at least one more game and at least two more days of the season. Listen to them. Really listen. They really believe.

“We can beat them,” Diaz said without a hint of boasting, just belief.

Why can’t they? And why can’t you start dreaming? It’s okay to do this now. It’s okay. It is.