They tried to hold out for one more absurd plot twist, because why not? The Mets were three runs down and colliding at 100 mph into a steel wall of probability, but there were 41,000 of them who’d stayed for nine innings, figuring they’d just keep doubling down until the dealer raked all their chips away.

“LET’S GO METS!”

“LET’S GO METS!”

It was a late-September plea in early August, and it failed, the Mets going down 1-2-3, Sean Doolittle getting a measure of revenge for the prominent part he’d already played in this memorable weekend, and so the Mets weren’t going to win a ninth straight game, weren’t going to win for the 16th time in 17 games. It ended Nationals 7, Mets 4.

Can’t win ’em all.

“That was a big series,” Mets manager Mickey Callaway said when it was over. “That’s a very solid team on the other side and we took two out of three from them, went 6-1 on the homestand. You can’t ask for a better homestand than that.”

It was still a sobering day, make no mistake. All across these past few weeks, the good feelings and good tidings had served as a form of camouflage, papering over the things that still plague the Mets, that could still serve as impediments for them finishing off the final few chapters of this stirring turnaround.

Sunday, there was no hiding them.

Sunday, first inning, Jacob deGrom loaded the bases but looked like he was about to wriggle free of trouble, inducing old friend Asdrubal Cabrera to drill a grounder to the right of first baseman Pete Alonso. Alonso made a nice play to keep the ball out of right field; he didn’t make a terrible throw, but he didn’t make a perfect one either. It bounded away from deGrom, and before long three Nats were touching home.

“I should’ve had that,” deGrom admitted, according to Callaway.

“I should’ve hit him in the chest,” Alonso lamented.

But defense has been a stone in the Mets’ shoe all year. They have sacrificed defense in the name of offense, played guys out of position, hoped for the best, and there have been times when it’s cost them and times when the extra offense has come in handy. But there aren’t a lot of Gold Gloves out there.

Then there is the monster that has loomed all season, that looms still, in the back of the team’s collective consciousness, in the middle of their fans’ anxiety closet, even after this stretch of .750 ball the past 28 games. The Mets survived late home runs allowed by Justin Wilson and Seth Lugo the prior two nights because there was enough pixie dust sprinkled in the bat rack.

This time they weren’t so lucky. Robert Gsellman and Wilson surrendered two runs in the seventh — the capstone a two-run double by Cabrera, who picked the Nats over the Mets this week because he was angry the Mets never called him back last offseason when he was pondering where to play.

More troubling was another awful performance by Edwin Diaz, even in a non-save situation. Victor Robles clobbered a do-nothing slider in the ninth, a one-run lead ballooned to three, and the notion that Diaz should be allowed anywhere near a high-leverage situation anytime soon suddenly looks utterly implausible.

Callaway said the team can’t afford to so radically alter bullpen roles, said Diaz “will continue to get big outs for us,” even though in his last six appearances the ERA is now 11.12 and the WHIP is 1.58 and if none of those things have yet cost a Mets a game they were about to win, that tightrope won’t do as the season winds down.

“I try to have a positive attitude every single time,” Diaz said. “If I get frustrated it’s only going to make things worse.”

We know about the danger in getting caught up in baseball extremes. The Mets aren’t as good as they looked in going 15-1, same as they weren’t as awful as they seemed when they were 11 games under .500. There’s 44 games to go. The Mets don’t need to go 44-0, or even 43-1. They need to merely win as many as they need to.

Tuesday night in Atlanta begins a new phase, a final push. No more need for pixie dust. Just good ball. We are always told everything good in the game starts with pitching and defense. The Mets were reminded of that Sunday. Forty-four games to prove how well those lessons will be learned.