It was the last of the ninth now atShea Stadium, last of the ninth in all ways, and they were all standing and begging for one last miracle out of the place. Not the kind of miracle we had in 1969, not the one that Seaver gave this place, and Koosman, and Agee andRon Swoboda. Not even the one we got on a Saturday night in 1986, two outs in the bottom of the 10th that time before crazy things started to happen with Carter and Mitchell and Knight and finallyWilliam Hayward Wilson. They didn’t want a big miracle now atShea. Just a small one. They stood now with the score 4-2 against theMets and really just asked for one more game.

YOU PICK: WHICH METS SHOULD BE KEPT OR DUMPED?

There were policemen everywhere you looked, and behind Box 312 where I was watching, some ushers appeared and fanned out to the left and right as the count went to 2-2 onDavid Wright. He was the first batter for the Mets in the last of the ninth, the Brewers already having won inMilwaukee. If the Mets could not score some runs right now this would be the last game ever played at Shea before Wright and the rest of them move out beyond the outfield walls toCiti Field next season.

They were playing to keep playing now, force a game against the Brewers at Shea tonight, see who would get the last playoff spot in theNational League this year.

One of the policeman asked the other behind 312 where the ushers were going and was told, “They’re just getting ready for the end.”

It had been 2-2 afterCarlos Beltran hit one over the wall in left and toward Citi Field in the bottom of the sixth, made the place sound the way it had always sounded in big moments like this, done that for the last time even though nobody would have believed that at the time. But thenScott Schoeneweis had come out of the bullpen and given up a home run to pinch-hitterWes Helms of theMarlins and it was 3-2, Florida.

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ThenJerry Manuel had gone toLuis Ayala, another scrub the Mets were trying to win with, andDan Uggla launched Ayala, and now it wasn’t quite as loud at Shea because the scoreboard said CC Sabbathia wasn’t going to lose to theCubs in Milwaukee.

We will talk all winter about the Mets bullpen. But on the last weekend of the season and the last weekend of baseball Shea will ever have, the Mets scored a total of five runs.

One Friday, two Saturday, two Sunday.

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It is a bit of a problem with the core Mets stars, Wright and Beltran andJose Reyes andCarlos Delgado:

They all do just enough to break your heart in the end.

So the Mets of 2007 and 2008, the ones who couldn’t hold a seven-game lead with 17 to play last year and fell totally out of things this year after having a 3-1/2-game lead with that same 17 to play, will be remembered in their city as being the poster boys for teams that break down in the stretch. This year’s team had to overcome more than last year’s team and nearly did. Nobody will remember that. They will just remember the Mets getting passed in the stretch, again, and that is why a lot of these players, and maybe at least one core player, have to go.

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“We need one or two of our hitters to step up,” Jerry Manuel said when it was over.

He can wait for that to happen next at Citi Field.

The big crowd tried to be as loud at the end as at the beginning. They tried even after they found out thatRyan Braun, a young star of the Brewers, had managed to step up Sunday, hitting a two-run homer in the eighth that made it 3-1 in Milwaukee. This was Shea, after all. Great things, magic things, had always happened in the late innings at Shea, hadn’t they?

To the end, the 56,000 wanted to believe, tried to believe, that the Marlins couldn’t do it to them again on the last day, the way they did last year. But then Delgado flied out with Reyes and Beltran on base in the eighth and now it was last ups at Shea Stadium in the ninth.

So many of the 56,000 had come to see the goodbye ceremonies when the game was over. But really they had come to yell their heads off, make the place sound the way it was supposed to, for one more day. Just the chance to play one of those play-in game against the Brewers tonight at 7:37.

In the seats behind Box 312, where we were watching the end of it, some people began to chant just that, “One more day!” They had to know the Mets weren’t going to have any chance against the Cubs in the playoffs even if the greatJohan Santana could have somehow gotten two starts, because Manuel was going to have to go back to that bullpen eventually.

The 56,000 still wanted one more day, because you always do in sports.

But then Wright, whose numbers were better than he hit down the stretch, popped out andEndy Chavez grounded back to the pitcher. Two outs. It had been two outs and nobody on in Game 6 in ’86 before Carter got a single.Damion Easley walked now, and that madeRyan Church the tying run at the plate.

He put a good swing on the ball and for a moment you thought he’d gotten it, but he hadn’t. The ball ended up in the center fielder’s glove and it wasn’t just one season ending out there, it was all of them. No roller from Mookie down the line. No game today. The miracles always came easier at Shea when the Mets were good enough. These Mets aren’t.