There are more exhaustive explanations than the one above for how the National League East has unfolded. Of the major American professional sports, baseball is the least stylistically variable and has the most data points over its 162-game season. As such, it’s the ideal laboratory for the now-encompassing movement of sports analytics. Managers have a firmer grasp on individual players’ values than at any point in history, and projection systems tasked with playing out entire seasons before the first pitch has even been thrown. Which is to say: The ESPN writers who picked the Nationals to skate to a division title had a great deal more than gut feelings and appraisals of pluck to go on. They can also do a great deal more than shrug their shoulders by way of explaining what went wrong.

For a certain strain of fan, though, teasing out the reasons for the flipped script is less rewarding than simply basking in it. As baseball has become smarter, it’s also become more predictable, and supposedly sure things are surer than ever before. A team like the present Mets, then, carries with it the hopes not only of a single fanbase but also of those who miss a certain kind of shock baseball once seemed more inclined to provide, back when its mechanisms were more inscrutable and its explanations tipped toward the mythic.

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This Mets season is best appreciated not as a culmination of years of modern baseball preparation—scouting, analyzing, player development, budgeting, free-agent signings, cheap buys, and timely sells—but as a mad, miraculous rush. The complaint common about “Based on a True Story” Hollywood films is that they sand down rough edges and confine everything to a tidy package of causality and archetype. But I defy fans to watch the Mets for even an hour without giving into the urge of turning the players into characters in a story.

There are the gifted kids—the long-coiffed pitchers Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard. There are the wizened old hands—the 42-year-old pitcher Bartolo Colón and the 36-year-old infielder Juan Uribe, both well past their All-Star primes but beloved for their clubhouse tutelage and sense of joyful ease. David Wright, a third baseman and lone holdover from the last Mets team to win the division, missed much of the season due to injury but hit a soaring home run in his first at-bat back. Matt Harvey, the All-Star pitcher who set off a brouhaha recently when he and his agent raised the possibility of an innings limit after Harvey missed 2014 recovering from elbow surgery, provides ability and controversy in equal measure. Yoenis Céspedes, the trunk-torsoed and omni-talented outfielder brought to New York at the trade deadline, both bats third and personifies the optimism surrounding the team—their hottest stretch of the season coincided with his arrival.