The Mets had been waiting for this day for nine years. Mets fans had been waiting for this day for nine years. I had been waiting for this day for nine years.

If I went to any games in 2006, I don’t remember them. I remember the excitement and eventual disappointment of the playoffs that year and I remember watching games on TV with my dad, a lifelong fan, as early as 1999. But live viewings I have no recollection of personally other than isolated memories of the nosebleeds and spectacularly bizarre exterior of Shea Stadium. Baseball cards, a worn out 2000 Subway World Series t-shirt, and a peripheral fondness for Ty Wigginton and Mike Piazza defined my Mets fandom in my formative years.

My first complete memory of an in-person Metropolitan experience was September 29th 2007. Glavotage Eve, if you will. A favorite Met of mine, compounded by this very game no doubt, John Maine pitched an absolute gem. For his fifteenth win of the season, with the Phillies hot on the tail of the then-88-win Mets, Maine was brilliant through 7.2 shutout innings. 14 strikeouts. 2 walks. 1 hit. Arguably the best game of his best season in his all too brief career.

Not that he needed to be that good. The Mets scored thirteen runs off of nineteen hits that day. Another once-prospect of a bygone youth movement, Lastings Milledge, hit two of his thirty-three career homeruns. Raul Castro launched one as well. Carlos Delgado, Moises Alou, and Luis Castillo all had multi-RBI games. David Wright and Carlos Beltran added to their triple-digit seasonal RBI counts.

My family had good seats in left field that, for once, weren’t in the highest reaches of the ballpark. The only issue was a slight obstruction of the deepest section of left field. Every time a ball would head towards us and reach the end of its arch beneath us, the fans in our section would hold our collective breathe until the rest of the crowd signaled disappointment or, much more frequently that day, celebration.

For an eleven year old whose love for baseball had grown significantly in the past year, it was everything I could ask for. The only addition that would have made it any better was a win the next day, putting the long September behind and launching the team into their second October in as many years. It was not to be.

My great-uncle was a priest in Brooklyn at the time and on September 30th there was a special mass at his parish to celebrate his fiftieth year in the priesthood. Some say his taking up of the cloth in 1957 was one of major contributing factors in the Dodgers decision to flee to Los Angeles.

Regardless of the holy man’s effect on baseball franchise migrations, my family was driving out to the church in the hope that the festivities in Brooklyn would align well with the Mets celebrations a borough away.

I still remember the devastation I felt as Howie Rose relayed the first inning over the radio as we drove up to the church. You could see the steam shoot out of a number of my father’s orifices, including ones that weren’t supposed to shoot steam and even in places where there hadn’t been orifices to begin with.

Look up the box score if you are lucky enough to be ignorant of what game I’m referring to. Or don’t. The world is probably better off the less people there are who are aware of the final act of Thomas Michael Glavine in a Mets uniform.

I conned my parents into letting me skip church and go watch the rest of the game in rectory, hoping for an eventual Amazin’ comeback. It never came.

I was hysterical. I didn’t understand how heartrenching this game and this team truly could be. My father took me for a walk and the man who had been born the same year the Mets played their first games told me all about what it meant to be a Mets fan in more than just name.

It sure didn’t sound like a lot of fun. Yet, I stayed.

I stayed with you bastards and these bastard owners we’re stuck with and this bastard team. I was in the very last row at the very last game at Shea in 2008 alongside my dad, brother, and best friend. A beautiful and historical Mets moment, but only once the game ended and all the Mets of yore came out. That year’s dreadful bullpen made sure of that.

I still have confetti from the last game at Shea postgame ceremonies and I still have the 2009 Sports Illustrated issue that predicted Jason Bay’s Mets would win the World Series. I still have my tickets from the twenty or so games I’ve gone to in the last nine years. I still have that ragged 2000 Subway World Series t-shirt.

What I didn’t have until Monday was the payoff from a season that I gave my full emotional investment and a pennant race to call my own.

I’m not trying to say that my nineteen years of rooting for the Mets has been harder than the thirty, forty, and fifty-three year veterans who have seen everything there is to have seen. But I’ve only truly known the turmoil and never felt the full reward of a year like this.

My father remembers the 1969 Mets, but just barely. In 1973, he was 11, the same age I was the year of Glavotage. The results were similarly crushing. But he remembers 1986 and all the magic and insanity that year brought. He also has 1988 and 1999 and 2000 and 2006 and all the demoralizing, life expectancy-reducing years in between.

The 2015 Mets are the team that I will get to look back at and recount all of the moments, big and small, that made this season so purely Amazin’. This is the team I will be able to call my own and nostalgically inflate the stats of Wilmer Flores and Ruben Tejada, the already incredible tenure of Yoenis Cespedes, and the weight of Bartolo Colon.

Monday’s game, the first playoff game in Citi Field history, was the first playoff game for both me and my father. We got two tickets. Section 532, Row 17, Seats 15 and 16. We got off the 7 train knowing the seats were going to be well into the stratosphere, just not specifically how far up. When we reached them, ninety minutes before the first pitch, the symmetrical humor of being in the very last row at the very first playoff game at Citi Field did not escape us.

Sitting in the last row or the first made no difference. For every Met fan in the building, the game was a brilliant sequence of spectacle and joyous grandeur, albeit a messy one. The imperfect introduction to Mets playoff baseball was the most intense and enjoyable emotional experience I have ever known.

It began with the boos. The Dodgers team was introduced, starting with the clubhouse and medical staff who were booed with great enthusiasm by 44,000 strong. After the Assassination of Ruben Tejada by the Coward Chase Utley on Saturday, New York wanted blood. The Mets themselves, it later came out, had decided not to pursue specific retaliation. Instead they opted for a thorough and comprehensive humiliation of the enemy.

It worked.

As the PA announcer went down the line of Dodgers players, coaches, and staff the boos grew in length and passion. Most players took it in stride and a few, Zach Grienke among them, cracked a smile in good sport with the verbally violent consequence of being the enemy in New York. Then Alex Anthony, longtime Mets PA announcer, spoke the words "Number Twenty-Six. Infielder. Chase Utley."

Before Anthony could finish the single syllable first-name, the place exploded into a concentrated, vulgar denunciation of the 36 year-old man and everything he has ever done, stood for, or loved.

Not even Grienke could smile after that.

"They look scared," My father said.

It was the Roman Colosseum reborn and incredible reintroduction of Mets fandom to the postseason. We the fans demanded the disgraced gladiator’s execution. Chants rained down throughout a game that never involved Utley leaving the dugout once the first pitch had been thrown. "Utley Sucks" initiated the campaign against the former-Phillie. Late in the game, triggered by a nine-year-old girl and her poster, the incantation "Utley Buttley" spread across the promenade. Most significantly, at least once an inning, the entire stadium joined in unison to relay our morbid demand. "We want Utley! We want Utley!"

The masses did not get their execution, but the conquest was that much sweeter without it.

Playing in Los Angeles doesn’t prepare you for the ruthless animosity of 44,000 pissed off New Yorkers. There are probably few things that can. Utley seemed rattled. His teammates seemed rattled. They played like they were rattled.

Maybe the Mets should have fought harder for home field advantage.

Excluding the response to Utley’s mere presence in the building, the rest of the night was equal parts chaotic and beautiful. Within minutes of Utley’s introduction, Ruben Tejada and his Mets cane were revealed to the delight and universal support of the fans, something he has never experienced in the entirety of his Mets tenure. For the pacifists among us, take solace in knowing the positive response to Ruben was somehow even louder than the negative response to his assaulter.

And the intensity and decibels of the response to Ruben’s limping was second only to the collective detonation of fans’ minds post-Cespedes’ "longgggg ding dong dong Jhonson" in the fourth inning. Like that 2007 John Maine game, the far reaches of left field were obscured to us in the bloodiest of the nosebleeds, but the crowd went wild and the umpire twirled his hand as if to say "start the party".

I missed the GOAT bat flip out of concern for my father who had submitted to fits of hysterical laughter and incessant high fiving of our fellow fans. Queens was shaking with a forceful rhythm in tune with the unstoppable Metsian machine.

Still, it was not a perfect game from start to finish. Harvey did not have his best performance and Goeddel couldn’t close the deal with a nine run lead. A fan along the third base line received medical assistance around the 8th inning after Cespedes rocketed a foul ball her way. The umpires delayed the game at the start, confounding nearly everyone at the park and at home, only for it turn out that Chase Utley had slid into the phone lines "accidentally" snapping the chords like he would a fibula. Of course, the d’Arnaud homerun, the Murphy mash, and Colon’s historical sixth inning helped outweigh any of the messy stuff.

Perhaps most epitomical of the disorder and conquest of the Mets win was the very first pitch. Not the one made by Matt Harvey, but the thirty foot toss made by Rusty Staub. Rusty couldn’t throw from the mound and even still bounced it in to Tim Teufel, yet the ugly toss from the Mets Hall of Famer was a triumph. Staub was only one week removed from heart attack that turned a plane flying over the Atlantic back to Ireland, where he had been vacationing. Yet there he was in Queens, on the field, playing catch.

Like Staub’s throw, The Mets first playoff game at Citi Field was not without error. Harvey did not throw a gem. The Dodgers did their damage. Bartolo Colon did not get a chance to bat. It was a huge victory regardless and the atmosphere was more vibrant and raucous than one ever could have ever expected, even with the growing excitement in Flushing these last few months.

The thrill of postseason baseball returning to Queens and being able to witness it firsthand is unlike anything I have experienced in my short life. I, a current Washington D.C. resident, was only in New York for fifteen hours and slept little, but the exhaustion was but a minor tradeoff for the exhilaration.

Nine years was well worth the wait.