Tom Suozzi

Heartbreak — and life lessons — at Citi Field

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Late Sunday night and early Monday morning, my sons Joseph, 17, and Michael, 12, and I stayed late at Citi Field, watching our Mets lose the World Series. We’re all bummed.

Bleary-eyed and puffy from the late hour and oversalted hot dogs (we love those Nathan’s hot dogs), sausage, popcorn and peanuts, I wanted to reflect on what it was like to ride so high and get knocked down so low while following a sports team.

I mean, does it really matter? After the game, as we hung around the Mets dugout for one last chance to cheer our team, Sandy Alderson, the general manager, walked by on the field. We joined 300 or so other die-hards chanting, “Sandy! Sandy!”

I thought about Hurricane Sandy, and volunteering with Michael three years ago this week in Long Beach, as an entire community pulled together to dig out. Now that mattered. The fact that, three years later, some people are still trying to navigate a spider web of bureaucracy to get back in their homes, truly matters.

But following a team closely matters, too. My boys and I will never forget the summer of 2015 and the time we spent together. The Mets were sure winners for the first months after Opening Day, only to fall apart by June. By late summer, though, they were back to superstar status. We’ll never forget Wilmer Flores crying at shortstop over rumors that he would be traded — and then hitting a home run two games later.

We were there in Washington, D.C., when the Mets were down 7-1, only to win 8-7 in one of the most memorable games of my life.

Sports are like our lives. Riding high in April and shot down in May. Think of Daniel Murphy’s incredible postseason home runs, and then how he went from hero to goat with errors at just the wrong time in games 4 and 5 on baseball’s biggest stage. And now we know there’s a reason Yoenis Cespedes has been traded so many times despite his incredible July and August. He’s streaky, and sometimes just gets it wrong.

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