They are Boys of Summer now, even in the chill of April, Opening Day for the mushrooming of a torrid love affair between a championship-starved fan base and a star-crossed franchise that has waited 30 years to be reignited like this.
The names front and center now are Harvey, deGrom, Syndergaard and Matz, a riveting Fearsome Foursome quarterbacked by catcher Travis d’Arnaud.
“It’s an honor. This could possibly be the best pitching staff in all history,” d’Arnaud told The Post.
In all history?
“Has there ever been four fireballers like that? I can’t think of any,” d’Arnaud said.
Yoenis Cespedes is the other marquee Boy of Summer, but no one should forget the Mets’ Loyal Boy of Summer, the longtime face of the franchise who saw light at the end of a black tunnel when few others did: Captain David Wright.
So easy to root for after all these years, on a Dream Team so easy to root for.
The Mets received their National League championship rings Thursday, and all the Boys of Summer immediately set their sights higher.
“That second-place ring is not what anybody in here wants,” Wright said. “We want that first-place ring. … The ring is beautiful, and it’s something I’m going to display proudly, but it’s also a reminder that we lost the World Series. And to get that close and lose, it sucks.”
It is justice that Wright, Captain New York now with Derek Jeter gone, once again can walk down the aisle at a marriage between team and town after the heartache and heartbreak he endured when the wheels came off.
“To be able to deliver for this fan base, and just to be able to take a stroll into the city or anywhere locally and get the pats on the back, to get the congratulations, to get the high-fives, to get the handshakes, it’s a very rewarding experience, and one that is tough to put into words,” Wright said. “Just because you feel such a sense of accomplishment — not for me, or not necessarily even for my teammates — you feel accomplishment for the organization. You feel like you’ve accomplished something for the fans, something that the fans can get behind and really … feel.
“Yes, we should have a good team. We had a good team last year. But I think we have a team that’s easy to root for, and guys that are easy to root for because we have good, genuine guys that go out there and play the game the right way and really respect this city and this organization, and put a lot of pride in putting this uniform on, which is tough to kind of put into words.”
Even when the payroll and the attendance began shrinking and his first and only team, the team he grew up rooting for, became a punch line, the Loyal Boy of Summer refused to stop believing in a better and brighter tomorrow.
“I would say faith. I would say loyalty. I would say, for me, a desire to win here, that was important to me,” Wright said.
“I was drafted by this organization. I was 18 years old. I couldn’t go buy beer, but I could go play baseball for a living for a team extremely loyal to me. For me, I’m reminded every day when I put the uniform on, or I see myself in a picture in a Mets uniform, how fortunate I am to be able to spend an entire career with one team, to be able to get to know security guards, clubhouse guys, players, fans, and become lifetime friends with these types of people.
“There’s no question to me that winning here is way up here [raises right hand over head], and for me at least, anywhere else just wouldn’t have been nearly as fulfilling as last year would have been.”
He is 33 all of a sudden, came face to face with his baseball mortality when spinal stenosis threatened to take it all away from him.
“I knew that that was possible. … Did I fear it? No,” Wright said. “It never really crossed my mind that I had played my last game, or anything like that.
“I made my rehab sessions. I made my doctor’s appointments around the Mets game. The text messages from my teammates, the phone calls from my teammates, the FaceTiming on the buses from my teammates, I think that that pushed me. Because it’s very easy to be forgotten about. … I knew that after I had kind of Googled it, I knew that it was possible because it has definitely ended some careers, but I was gonna do everything in my power to make sure that I wasn’t one of them.”
Thankfully, he wasn’t.
“Anytime you see someone who’s genuine, you want to root for him,” the now-retired Michael Cuddyer said. “He’s never made excuses for anything, good or bad. He’s never shied away from anything, good or bad. And that’s rare. It’s rare to see a professional athlete of his stature with that mentality, that personality. In life, not just professional athletes, but if you come across people with that type of nature, you root for ’em, you want to be around ’em, and it’s infectious.”
Opening Day of Summer in the Citi.