A reminder that it’s generally considered bad form to start stealing seats before the end of May:

A Mets fan struck out in his attempt to take a piece of Shea Stadium home with him, cops said Tuesday.

Patrick Oriani, 18, of Jersey City, was caught stealing the bottom half of a red upper-deck seat after the Mets’ 10-4 loss to the Washington Nationals on Monday night, police said. He had the souvenir wrapped in a blanket.

Oriani was charged with possession of stolen property, criminal mischief and petty larceny, police said.

Location Scout: Shea Stadium.

. . . but Yankees fans aren’t like other fans. Add to the annals of Yankee-hating lore:

The boozed-up Yankee fan from hell who ran over and killed a Red Sox supporter last week had a crush on Derek Jeter and a living room dominated by Pinstripe regalia.

A neighbor of Ivonne Hernandez, 43, who was charged with murder for allegedly running down Matthew Beaudoin in her Dodge Intrepid in Nashua, said the Bronx-bred fan loved the handsome shortstop.

“She thought he was hot and had beautiful eyes,” said the 28-year-old mom, who declined to be identified.

She was less excited by Alex Rodriguez, who she felt was a “wuss,” the Nashua neighbor recounted.

. . .

Hernandez, taunted by Red Sox fans outside a bar, bounced the 29-year-old off her windshield at up to 60 mph, witnesses said.

. . .

Officials said Friday’s events turned deadly not long after Hernandez slapped a female bartender outside a bar. The bartender’s friends chased Hernandez to her car and, seeing the Yankee logo on her rear windshield, began chanting, “Yankees suck!”

Hernandez hurriedly drove away, then stopped.

“She turned her car around and gunned the engine toward Matthew,” a witness told The Post yesterday. “She hit him and he was on the windshield. He flew 40 feet in the air.”

The witness said he cradled Matthew’s body in his arms, as he gasped for air. Beaudoin was taken off life support the next day.

Officials said Hernandez claimed she only wanted to scare the hecklers and expected them to get out the way.

Hernandez is being held without bail on charges of murder and aggravated DWI.

But you know what they say about guys who drive Lamborghinis:

New York sports teams scored miserably with their fans when it came to performance and likability, with the awful Knicks dead last in a nationwide fan-satisfaction poll, according to ESPN The Magazine.

Even the Big Apple’s pride and joy — the Super Bowl-champion Giants — placed 48th out of the 122 pro teams that comprised the Web-site survey of NBA, NFL and NHL and MLB rooters.

. . .

The survey graded fan satisfaction based on the affordability of tickets and the stadium experience, their team’s win-loss performance, and the accessibility of players.

Unfortunately, you have to go all the way to No. 40 to find the first of our nine local teams — the New Jersey Devils.

. . .

The Yankees bombed out in 65th place, well below last year’s 48th.

Part of the reason is that new manager Joe Girardi “is no Joe Torre,” according to fellow analyst Eddie Matz.

“Throw in price hikes for beer [up a dollar to $7], soda [up $1.50 to $5] and parking [up $2 to $14], and the imminent destruction of Yankee Stadium . . . and the Yanks drop by 17 spots overall, giving them their lowest ranking in [ESPN] standings history,” he blogged.

But the Yanks did beat the Mets, who scraped the bottom at No. 93, behind even the hated Boston Red Sox, which claimed 89th place.

Sure he’s a traitor, blah blah, but there’s also something really, really funny about it:

The man who tried to curse the Yankees by burying a Red Sox jersey in the Bombers’ new stadium lives just a short drive from the House that Ruth Built.

The culprit is a mason — born and raised in the Country Club section of southeast Bronx.

“As I stuck it in, I said, ‘The Yankees are done for the next 30 years.’ I only put a 30-year curse because I’m 46 and in 30 years I’ll be dead, and I won’t care if the Yankees win then,” said “Gino,” who spoke from a construction job in Manhattan.

Already, the man’s co-workers defaced his station wagon with Yankee slogans written in shoe polish.

Long a Yankee hater, the turncoat hatched his plan last August after refusing to set foot on the job out of spite.

One summer day, he placed a carefully folded jersey bearing the name and uniform number of David Ortiz, the slugging Red Sox designated hitter known as Big Papi, into the concrete mix being laid along the third base line.

“The reason why is George Steinbrenner told [Yankees GM Brian] Cashman to get Ortiz and Cashman told him, we don’t need him, We have [Jason] Giambi and Nick Johnson,” Gino boasted, referring to a chance the Yanks had to sign Ortiz in 2003.

“Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for All-State Insurance company to make more money,” he ranted. “Every ball thrown, I hope I have the last laugh. Red Sox Nation is alive and well.”

Two witnesses spotted the mason planting the shirt, which he wore to work that day, in the floor of the visitor’s locker room in front of the third-base line — not on the field.

But Gino was coy as to the exact location.

The Steinbrenners “don’t have enough money to [make me] tell you where it actually is,” he said.

The traitor said he’d been rooting for the Red Sox since the days of Jim Rice in the 1970s.

When he buried the jersey, this Benedict Arnold was making $88 an hour to do construction at the treasured site. And he documented the entire sabotage on his cellphone camera.

Is it perverse New-York-is-the-center-of-the-world braggadocio to say that Isiah Thomas’ Knicks are “Absolutely, Positively the Worst Team in the History of Professional Sports”? No, actually it seems about right:

When the venerable Donnie Walsh arrived on Wednesday as the Knicks’ fourth president in seven years, he supplanted the least-loved incumbent since LBJ. During the four years and change of the Isiah Thomas era, the team lost more than 60 percent of its games, a ratio that got worse after Thomas added the title of head coach in 2006. Over that span, the Knicks have amassed the largest payroll (peaking at more than $160 million with luxury tax) and the third-worst record in the National Basketball Association. Never has so much been spent for so little in the world of sports. They’ve been called the worst team in the history of pro basketball, but they’re really much worse than that. These Knicks are worse than the fire-sale ‘41 Phillies or the expansion ‘62 Mets or the ‘76 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who were perfect in their winlessness. They’re the worst of the worst because of how they’ve lost, in petulance and complacency — and with management that bulldozed any critic it could not ignore.

. . .

Not surprisingly, the current edition leads the league in forced shots, blown assignments, sideline spats, mini-mutinies, and wholesale mockery. Old nemesis Reggie Miller, now on TNT, called the Knicks “a leaguewide joke.” The Phoenix Suns’ Leandro Barbosa was distraught when a prankster said they had traded for him. “My heart was hurting,” the Brazilian said. “I went a little crazy.”

. . .

The HMS Thomas was a loose ship. Practices went short, with scant focus on defense and off days galore. When Isiah got bored, he’d invite a special guest like boxer Roy Jones Jr. to join their drills or hang around the locker room. Perhaps the Knicks ran out of things to do, as their playbook was the slimmest in the league. “Scouts love going to see them because it’s an easy night,” the Eastern scout said. When in doubt, Thomas fell back on “isolation,” where Randolph or Crawford went one-on-one before chucking. This didn’t take much practice; the players had been doing it since they were 8 years old.

An early start to looting at old Yankee Stadium:

Stealing and bunting are normally encouraged in baseball, but a pair of dumb Yankee season-ticket holders learned the hard way that the two do not go together.

John Bunjaporte, 41, and Keith O’Rourke, 39, both of Westchester County, allegedly tried to snatch a piece of the red, white, and blue bunting that hangs over the edge of the upper deck, police said.

The team took the highly unusual step of revoking their $55-per-game season tickets because the Yanks intend to auction off every last brick and grain of dirt in the stadium after the season, officials said.

Both were charged with petit larceny and criminal mischief. They face fines and up to a year in prison.

Location Scout: Yankee Stadium.

$57 million from old seats is a tidy sum. But add $25 baggies of dirt to that, and you’ve got a lot of money:

The Yankees and Mets are in secret talks with the city to buy their old ballparks before the wrecking balls hit — so they can plunder them for lucrative memorabilia to peddle to fans, The Post has learned.

A spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg confirmed the negotiations but would not say how the deals might go down — specifically, whether the city would hope to get a lump sum from the teams or a percentage of the profits of any sale or auction of items.

“At other stadiums, everything from the scoreboards to the dugout urinals have been snatched up by fans, but Yankee Stadium is in a whole other league of collectibles,” said Mike Heffner, president of Lelands.com, which has handled several stadium garage sales.

“Each brick could sell for $100 to $300,” Heffner said. “I doubt we’d have any trouble selling every seat in the house for as much as $1,000.

“With its huge fan base, Shea Stadium will also fetch a big payday.”

Yankee sources and a Mets spokesman separately confirmed the teams’ negotiations with the city but refused to give details, citing their ongoing talks.

While the city owns the two stadiums, experts said the teams are in a far better position to bring in bigger bucks from a sell-off because of the emotion factor.

A tiny baggy of infield dirt from Yankee Stadium could fetch $25, experts said.

It’s getting as expensive as sex to go to Yankees games:

Those $250 box seats at Yankee Stadium will seem inexpensive in 2009.

The Yankees will charge $500 to $2,500 for seats near home plate in the first five to eight rows of their new ballpark — yet say they already have commitments for all 122.

The team’s Web site touts the premium areas as offering “an exclusive experience for those with discerning taste who seek the very best that life has to offer.”

Lonn Trost, the Yankees’ chief operating officer, sent a letter to season-ticket holders on March 14 that outlined premium seating in the $1.3 billion ballpark-to-be and asked whether they wanted to upgrade.

Trost said yesterday that more than 3,000 fans — “a remarkable response” — had already said yes.

Now that the seven-figure NCAA pool at Jody’s is gone, another bar takes up the slack:

It will be at least another year — if ever — before Jody’s Club Forest reinstates its legendary March Madness pool, which reached a $1.5 million pot and had hordes of bettors lined up outside the tavern until it got benched last year.

But that hasn’t stopped plenty of people from calling the Forest Avenue bar in hopes the NCAA basketball pool had somehow been resumed — and at least one other bar is trying to fill the void.

“We still have people coming in looking for it,” Mary Haggerty, wife of Jody’s owner Jody Haggerty, said by telephone from her home yesterday. “I’m sure we would love to see it [come back]. People have been asking for it to come back and they’re hoping, but it’s not going to be this year.”

Meanwhile, most bettors interviewed by the Advance yesterday agreed that the place to bet on the games is Dannyboy’s Tavern, an establishment located about 2 1/2 miles from Jody’s, on Victory Boulevard in Castleton Corners.

“The problem with Jody’s is, no one was paying taxes on it except the last guy who won. It just got too big, and it was blatant that it was getting so huge,” said one patron, picking up a Dannyboy’s betting pool form at Jimmy Max in Westerleigh yesterday. “Let me put it this way: Danny’s is legit, and I haven’t heard of anywhere else.”

The first round of NCAA tournament games begins tomorrow, but most pools focus on naming the Final Four, the ultimate champ and — the tiebreaker — the final game point total.

Dannyboy’s was keeping unusually tight-lipped about what is a legitimate and perfectly legal enterprise, but some estimates put the size of last year’s pool at $200,000. By comparison, Jody’s topped out at a $1.5 million payout at the end of its 29-year-run and was featured in national publications and network news shows.

. . .

On the paperwork for Dannyboy’s pool, clearly marked is a pledge that all of the money bet will be handed over to the winner, and a warning that any patron lucky enough to win “will be provided with a form 1099 and is responsible for applicable taxes.”

Even as the economy cools, there will always be a market for irrational sentimentalism:

Only New York fans with some luck and deep pockets will have a shot of scoring a ticket to the last regular season games ever at Yankee and Shea stadiums this fall.

Scalpers online are asking for nearly $6,000 for the Mets final Shea game on Sept. 28, while tickets have been seen as high as a whopping $17,000 for the Yanks Sept. 21 match-up against the Orioles. And if you want to see the first All-Star game this summer at Yankee Stadium since 1977, it’ll take $25,000 to snag one ticket on the field championship level.

“Since the game went on sale and sold out (on Feb. 20) the demand is insane,” said Moe Schlachter, who’s asking for at least $3,800 for his pair of championship box seats. He said that since posting his Yankees tickets on Craigslist last week, he has already gotten 20 to 30 responses.

The 22-year-old student guessed that if the Yankees don’t make the playoffs — ensuring that the Sept. 21 game would indeed be the last at the House that Ruth Built — the prices to resell tickets could quadruple.

Face-value field championship box seats at the stadium range from $240 to $380.

While the Yankees finale sold out in 11 minutes, Mets fans can still swipe a ticket for the Sept. 28 home game against the Marlins through special packages. The most expensive seat being offered for either game was from a bold stubhub.com hawker asking $16,791 each for his Tier Box MVP seats, which normally go for about $70. Since last year, ticket scalping in New York has been legal.

50 tons . . . why that’s 100,000 pounds of paper — this for a team that plays in New Jersey:

About 50 tons of shredded paper is expected to rain down upon fans and members of the 2008 Super Bowl champions, the Giants, as the team travels up the storied Broadway route to City Hall for a ceremony to commemorate their win over the Patriots.

The parade marks the first victory march through the Canyon of Heroes for the Giants, a franchise that before Sunday’s upset victory had won the Super Bowl twice. The Yankees were the last New York team to receive the honor, after winning the World Series in 2000.

In preparation for the 11 a.m. parade, the city yesterday procured 1,000 pounds of shredded paper donated by a packing company in Brooklyn, Atlas Materials. The rest of the expected 49 tons of paper will likely come from the bowels of shredders belonging to companies along the route.

Following its first Super Bowl victory, in 1987, the team was denied the opportunity to hold a ticker-tape parade because Mayor Koch said he didn’t recognize the Giants as a New York team after their decision to move to New Jersey for a lucrative stadium deal.

In 1991, the Giants won the Super Bowl for a second time, but with the Gulf War weighing on the country, it was decided a parade would not be appropriate, an assistant commissioner of the New York City Department of Records, Kenneth Cobb, said.

The end is near when New Yorkers start embracing the underdog role:

In this town, a sports championship usually consists of the Yankees winning in October. Which is to say, another year to hang on the stadium walls, another ticker-tape parade.

Yet no matter how good such victories may feel — and it’s getting somewhat harder to remember — Yankee championships have always felt a bit more like the divine right of a king than the conquest of a warrior; a bit more about the payrolls than the putouts; and, when you really get down to it, a bit more of the same.

Not so the Giants’ stunning win in the Super Bowl on Sunday night, a victory that actually felt victorious. In the unfamiliar role of the underdog, New Yorkers finally had a chance to savor the sweet taste of a triumph that wasn’t only unexpected but was utterly deserved.

“The wine tastes better when you think the cup is full of coffee,” said Paul Majors, a superintendent from the Bronx who stepped onto a downtown No. 2 train Monday morning in an Eli Manning jersey and a dark blue Giants cap. By Mr. Majors’s lights, the great enjoyment of the game revolved around a single word: “surprise.”

Super Bowl wins aside, New York seems to be dangerously close to developing the kind of unbecoming inferiority complex usually reserved for second-tier cities like . . . well, Boston, for example:

In Times Square and across the New York region, screaming fans jammed bars and after the Giants beat the New England Patriots, 17-14, in dramatic fashion in Super Bowl XLII, boisterous throngs filled the streets. The police deployed squad cars and mounted patrols to keep the exuberance under control across the city.

“Everybody’s a Giants fan tonight,” said John Johnson, 55, a native Floridian who ran out of the Millennium Hotel in Midtown with a double Crown Royal, neat, still in hand. “We knew there was going to be pandemonium, and we wanted to be a part of it.”

Scores of sports fans stampeded Times Square from neighboring hotels and restaurants, lining the intersection of 43rd Street and Broadway and Seventh Avenue. Officers on horseback yelled into megaphones, “Please do not block the crosswalk,” as they struggled to hold back the raucous, quickly forming crowd, which eventually stretched back four blocks.

. . .

One Sunnyside resident, Luis Pinzon, 27, was overcome with joy. “We finally beat Boston,” he said, wearing a Lawrence Taylor jersey. “That’s all I care about. We finally beat ‘em. Not Boston. Undefeated Boston,” he said with vindictive relish. “That’s who we beat. As long as they won, I don’t care if the Yankees lose to the Red Sox for the next five years. I’m not going to complain. That’s enough. I’ll give my first-born child to — to — to whomever.”

Mr. Pinzon’s wife, Sonia Pinzon, 26, said she was trying to be supportive, but giving up a child was where she drew the line. “I don’t think so,” she said.

The Patriots get cocky . . . the Giants stay cockier:

If the Giants win the Super Bowl on Sunday, the city is prepared to throw them a party.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said plans are in the works for a victory parade and ceremony to take place on Tuesday following the big game.

The parade would start at 10 a.m. at the U.S. Custom House and travel uptown on Broadway to City Hall, where grandstands would seat 5,000 fans for a 1 p.m. celebration ceremony.

I was beginning to feel a little proud of the Giants until I saw this:

When it comes to celebrating their home team’s first shot at the NFL championship in seven years, many New Yorkers are lacking neither money nor creativity.

Among the decorations for one Sunday Giants celebration is a 4-foot tall ice sculpture crafted to look just like the Vince Lombardi Super Bowl Trophy.

“Sports audiences are very physical and get very excited,” said Shintaro Okamoto, the founder of Okamoto Studio in Long Island City, who is making the ice sculpture. “We want to make sure our Super Bowl sculptures are very strong and durable.”

Okamoto said he is also fielding inquires from New York “hedge fund people and bankers” looking to spend upwards of $750 on ice sculptures in the shape of a Giants helmet for their private loft parties.

Get a hold of yourself, man, it’s just a dumb game:

His back to the wall, his personal space consumed by cameras and microphones, Isiah Thomas breathed deep and dutifully navigated a dozen questions over 11 minutes Tuesday afternoon.

. . .

“We’ve got to win our fans back,” Thomas said, vowing that the Knicks were up to the challenge.

“To me, it’s win or die,” he said. “And I literally mean death. I don’t mean walk away. I mean death. That’s how I approach it. And we got a job to do here, we’re going to get it done. I’m confident we got the right players, I’m confident we got the right people, and we’ll dig our way out of this.”

It’s convenient to view the Meadowlands as a giant red-light district for boorish New York sports fans:

At halftime of the Jets’ home game against the Pittsburgh Steelers on Sunday, several hundred men lined one of Giants Stadium’s two pedestrian ramps at Gate D. Three deep in some areas, they whistled and jumped up and down. Then they began an obscenity-laced chant, demanding that the few women in the gathering expose their breasts.

When one woman appeared to be on the verge of obliging, the hooting and hollering intensified. But then she walked away, and plastic beer bottles and spit went flying. Boos swept through the crowd of unsatisfied men.

Marco Hoffner, an 18-year-old from Lacey Township, N.J., was expecting to see more. Not from the Jets — they pulled off a big upset over the Steelers. He wanted more from the alternative halftime show that, according to many fans, has been a staple at Jets home games for years.

“Very disappointed, because we’re used to seeing a lot,” Hoffner said.

The mood of previous Gate D crowds — captured on video clips posted on YouTube — sometimes bordered on hostile, not unlike the spirit of infamously aggressive European soccer hooligans. One clip online shows a woman being groped by a man standing next to her.

Sunday’s scene played out for about 20 minutes, and at least one woman granted the men’s request, setting off a roar as if the former star running back Curtis Martin had just scored a touchdown. Martin was actually nearby, being honored on the field in the official halftime show, which had a far less intense audience.

And who thought the West Side Stadium would be a good thing? Oh yeah. May the (2-8!) Jets never, ever return from New Jersey.

Teams of the Mets’ supposed stature (not to mention payroll — $116 million in 2007!) shouldn’t be selling bricks like they’re raising cash for a church rec room, but then there are the Mets, selling bricks like they’re the Minnesota Twins or something:

Diehard fans of the New York Mets will get the chance to get in on the ground floor of the billion-dollar Citi Field stadium — literally. Last week the baseball club unveiled plans for the Citi Field Fanwalk, a plaza outside the planned Jackie Robinson Rotunda paved entirely with custom-engraved bricks purchased by baseball fans.

Three brick types are available: a $395 8-by-8-inch brick engraved with the Mets’ interlocking “NY” and four lines of text; a $340 8-by-8-inch brick with six lines of text; and a $195 4-by-8-inch brick with three lines of text. Each line of text can hold up to 15 characters, including spaces and punctuation.

A-Rod has always been the type of player who really comes through when it counts:

Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, who had one of the best statistical seasons in the storied history of the Yankees, opted out of the final three years on his 10-year, $252 million contract Sunday, according to his agent. The move makes him a free agent and potentially ends his career with the team.

“We have put it in writing and sent it to the Yankees,” Rodriguez’s agent, Scott Boras, said in a telephone interview.

The Yankees had said they would not negotiate with Rodriguez if he opted out, so he might have played his final game with them. There is a chance that the Yankees could change their minds and negotiate with Boras toward a contract, but Rodriguez will be a free agent and will be able to negotiate with all 30 teams.

On the night their archrival, the Boston Red Sox, won the World Series for the second time in four seasons, the Yankees may have lost the player widely considered the best in the game. Rodriguez led the major leagues this season with 54 home runs, including the 500th of his career, and 156 runs batted in. He is expected to win his third Most Valuable Player award.

*

Hillary has an opening here to become the one true Yankees fan running for President:

As he moves about the country campaigning for the White House, Rudolph W. Giuliani is not always kind in describing where he comes from. New York City, he will say, is a tough town, hard to govern. It’s liberal to a fault and unruly as a child.

Now, however, there has come what is for many the true unpardonable insult: Mr. Giuliani has declared he will be rooting for the dreaded Boston Red Sox against the Colorado Rockies in the World Series, which began last night. From the Bronx to his childhood haunts in Brooklyn, there was a baffled anger bordering on rage.

“They should burn his seat that he sat in at Yankee Stadium — how’s that?” said George Patsin, a Brooklyn restaurateur. “They should burn it on TV so I can watch.”

. . .

By way of explanation, Mr. Giuliani couched his shift in loyalty as support for the American League. (”I’m an American League fan and I go with the American League team,” he told reporters — not coincidentally — in the primary state and Boston neighbor of New Hampshire.) “I thought he was loyal to New York,” said Kebrae H. Scott, 30, a maintenance worker who wore a Yankees cap as he was heading to his home in the Ebbets Fields Apartments in Brooklyn near where Mr. Giuliani grew up.

. . .

Of course, his most revealing comment on the subject was perhaps the answer he provided to The Providence Journal in Rhode Island when asked, this June, if he would agree to be president if it hinged on his becoming a Red Sox fan.

“I have great respect for people who really are fans of the team they say they are fans of,” Mr. Giuliani said. “But probably that’s a deal I could not make.”

Joe Torre gives the Boss the full Johnny Paycheck, gets to live out the double-barreled middle finger fantasy most of us can only dream about:

It was the longest-running and most successful show in the Bronx in decades, running from 1996 through 2007 and stretching into October every season. By the end, it was playing to sold-out crowds almost nightly, and there were moments of magic that may never be repeated.

But the curtain fell on the Joe Torre Era yesterday when Torre, who will someday enter the Hall of Fame for his work as the Yankees’ manager, rejected the team’s one-year contract offer to stay. The Yankees said they would begin a search for a new manager.

Torre flew to Tampa, Fla., yesterday to meet with the team’s principal owner, George Steinbrenner, after two days of organizational meetings had ended with no announcement. The Yankees offered Torre $5 million, but he could have earned an additional $3 million — and a guaranteed $8 million salary in 2009 — if he had led the Yankees to the World Series next season.

The salary would have kept Torre as the highest-paid manager in the majors, but the guaranteed portion would have represented a cut from his present salary, which averaged $6.4 million over the last three seasons. In each year of that contract, the Yankees lost in the first round of the playoffs.

. . .

[Third base coach Larry] Bowa said he was surprised that Torre would fly to Tampa if he knew he was going to reject the Yankees’ offer, echoing a widely held sentiment.

If you’re enjoying watching hapless Mets fans suffer following the team’s unprecedented collapse, rest assured that there is a busy third day of coverage. First, the Times’ Murray Chass on what could have been:

This was supposed to be the game the Mets played, this afternoon’s game between Colorado and Philadelphia that begins this year’s postseason. But the Mets won’t be playing at Shea Stadium today. They have all scattered to their homes in various countries to dwell on their stunning collective failure and ponder their new place in baseball infamy.

Then there’s manager Willie Randolph’s cries for help:

In the roughly 40 hours that had elapsed since he left Shea Stadium on Sunday evening and returned yesterday morning, Willie Randolph had symbolically distanced himself from the Mets’ collapse. Randolph shaved his mustache, and his explanation — “Not a good time to be recognized in this town,” he said with a knowing smile — probably contained a kernel of truth.

His droll acknowledgment of the team’s failure to make the playoffs — a flop, he learned yesterday, that would not cost him his job as the team’s manager — offered a rare glimpse into a man whose public persona remained defiantly low-key and positive, even as the season was unraveling.

But yesterday Randolph opened up in a way that he seldom did during the season, conceding that the team may have been overconfident and acknowledging that his frustration has kept him awake at night.

“I’ve always been associated with winning, and it hurts deep down inside, really hurts, to be associated with this type of collapse,” Randolph said. “That’s not how we play the game, and there’s no way in the world that I thought we would be in this position right now talking about this; I thought we’d be preparing for the postseason. But it’s a cruel lesson in life and baseball. Make your bed and you live in it. We definitely set us up for this disappointment.”

. . .

“When the finality comes down, and you know that you didn’t reach your goal and you didn’t achieve what you wanted to achieve, it really tears you apart inside,” Randolph said. “Like I said, I’ve been there before, but this is probably the most pain I’ve felt since I’ve been in baseball.”

Not so bad, though, that he considered doing anything drastic. Asked again why he decided to shave his mustache, which will live on in the television footage and photographs chronicling the collapse, Randolph said, “I tried to cut my throat, but I aimed too high.”

And on top of all that, it’s revealed that reliever Scott Schoeneweis may be linked to Major League Baseball’s steroid scandal:

As Major League Baseball moves into the postseason, published reports linking players to performance-enhancing drugs continue to appear, creating a continued distraction for the sport and raising questions about whether the drug-testing program introduced in recent seasons is being outmaneuvered.

The latest report came Monday, when ESPN.com reported that Mets relief pitcher Scott Schoeneweis received six shipments of steroids in 2003 and 2004, when he played for the Chicago White Sox.

. . .

At Shea Stadium yesterday, Mets General Manager Omar Minaya said that the team had no knowledge of anything linking Schoeneweis to performance-enhancing substances when they signed him.

There’s something unnervingly unmanly about the idea that Alex Rodriguez gets pumped up by listening to Pat Benatar:

Alex Rodriguez’s choice of music in spring training was perfectly fitting for his personality. As he prepared for the season, he played the Pat Benatar song “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” over and over, at high volume, in his earphones. The message was purposeful, motivational . . . and just a little forced.

Knock me down, it’s all in vain, I’ll get right back on my feet again!

After a collapse so complete, so devastating, it’s understandable that you might start to question everything:

It wasn’t easy being a Mets fan yesterday, but it could not have been much harder on the fans than on those in hard hats building their laughingstock of a team a brand-spanking-new stadium in Flushing, Queens. In a city where the work can be hard and thankless, the combination of both was tough to beat here, backbreaking and heartbreaking all at once.

To hear Denis O’Neil, 36, an electrician, describe the mood at the construction site, one would think there had been a fatal on-the-job accident. “It’s just a somber day, you know?” he said. “There’s not really anything I could have done.”

But his feeling of helplessness quickly turned to anger. “What do you need a new stadium for?” he said, ignoring the fact that he was calling into question his own livelihood. “You can’t even win at the old stadium. What do you need a new one for?”

Location Scout: Citi Field.

The hubris of the Mets weighs heavily on those who are the least equipped to handle it:

Some cried at the end. Some laid blame. Some looked stunned and wretched. And the voices of Mets fans who had roared all summer for their no-bones champions were silent or subdued or outraged, with all bragging rights lost and grand dreams vanished on the last day of the season.

Around Shea Stadium as the stragglers filed out, on the Flushing trains bearing them away from the scene, in sports bars and homes where they had watched the debacle, Mets fans were a tragic lot: angry, betrayed, frustrated, baffled, crestfallen, as cheated and solemn as riders in a gallows cart.

. . .

The No. 7 train from Shea ran a bit slower into Manhattan, at least for the downtrodden in orange and blue. Little boys in Mets caps held the hands of fathers who had been crying. Couples rode silently, pensive and commiserating with head shakes and whispers.

But a man in a Mets jersey and salt-and-pepper hair shouted his disgust for all to hear. “I want an apology,” he demanded. “I want it in the newspaper, on TV and the radio.”

Dennis Higgins stormed off the train. “You want to know how I feel?” he asked a reporter. “I’m miserable, just miserable. I got hit with a double whammy. My girlfriend broke up with me last night, and then this.”

Katherine Hickey, a Mets follower for 40 years, said she watched distraught fans in the stands after the game. “Some people were crying,” she said. “They were in their seats with their heads in their hands, shaking. This is very difficult for all of us.”

After the pasta and meatballs dishes had been cleared from the dinner table, late afternoon at the Yonkers home of Carmela Olley, a 56-year-old widow and a Met fan for 30 years, was funereal. “It was like somebody died,” she said. “My nephew Joey kept repeating, ‘I’m so sorry, Aunt Carmela.’ My sister Theresa knows what this means to me every year, to watch and hope for the Mets.”

In Great Neck, Lenore Belzer, who grew up in Brooklyn in the 1950s, said she watched the Mets game alone, and was somehow reminded of the bygone Dodgers. “It was like reliving the past with the Dodgers,” she said. “And now I’m sick again.”

For Mets fans, the day began like a metaphor for New York itself — with confidence, hope and an armored determination. But after the first inning, with the Mets losing 7 to 1, most could glimpse the end like a distant dark cloud.

And let the recriminations begin . . . Billy Wagner in New York Magazine:

“We’ve been throwing four innings a night — for months!” he says. “Our pitching coach [Rick Peterson] has no experience talking to a bullpen. He can help you mechanically, but he can’t tell you the emotions. He has no idea what it feels like. And neither does Willie [Randolph]. They’re not a lot of help, put it that way.”

Staten Island psychics conclude that the Mets are toast:

“It ain’t over till it’s over,” Yogi Berra famously quipped, but for one Staten Island psychic, it’s over even before it ain’t.

“They’re not going to come close to winning whatsoever,” seer Jim Weiss said yesterday. “I just don’t get a good feeling about this team.”

Zillions of pundits and fans have been getting bad vibes from this New York nine since they started tanking last month, and you don’t need a sixth sense to read the stats.

The Mets lost a comfortable seven-game lead over the Phillies and now stand a game behind after last night’s 7-4 loss.

Looking ahead to this tense weekend of baseball, which will likely decide whether the Mets will make the playoffs, the Advance consulted with Weiss in his Prince’s Bay office:

“I hope I’m wrong, but I wrote them off back in June,” he said. “It’s as if they’re out of step. They’re not coordinated as a team.”

. . .

Astrologer Tanya Milton of St. George said it would take several days’ work to run star charts for the bombing bullpen — five days for the whole team. But she did perform a tarot card reading for slumping shortstop Jose Reyes, using his date of birth to predict his fate:

“I’m sensing that he’s feeling very insecure about his fans, and that might put him in a tilt,” she said. “If he could block out negative energy and focus on the game, he will prove himself and it will be a good [series]. Geminis depend a lot on the approval of others. Their egos need to be stroked.”

A pre-9/11 take on the Mets’ ineptitude:

As mortified fans watch the Mets fritter away their once-commanding grip on first place in the National League East, dread infects the city that it might be witnessing a collapse of unprecedented proportions. Even those who far prefer the Yankees can’t escape the fact that such a nose dive would be downright humiliating to New York.

How could they? How dare they?

John Glendinning, 53, a retired laborer from Brooklyn who goes by Whitey, is so agitated he can’t watch the games without losing his sense of civility. “I get too nervous,” he said. “I start throwing things at the wall.”

But, hey, calm down. Collapses happen.

Indeed, where would the city be without its grandiose collapses? The all-out falls from grace or riches or first place, or even a simple upright position, are a familiar and infuriating and perhaps even necessary part of the New York experience. And while collapses smart, they can also be spellbinding.

These breakdowns, of course, aren’t confined to baseball teams that suddenly forget how to hit or pitch, not to mention catch fly balls. They materialize in every aspect of life.

Roads collapse, stores collapse, financial markets collapse, egos collapse. They’ve all happened throughout New York’s history, again and again. During the 1975 fiscal crisis, in fact, the entire city just about collapsed.

Collapses can be aberrant or telling. They can reveal something about larger societal verities. Or they can be vacant of meaning — simply perversely breathtaking to watch.

Part of what makes these sour episodes so intriguing is the velocity at which they can happen. Part of what makes them so frightening is that they can upend our world, even cause us to root for a different team. People and institutions that we thought we knew and trusted to always be there are — poof — gone just like that.

Then again, one of the worthwhile things about collapses is that they allow the often pleasing challenge of recovery, which isn’t always that hard.

. . .

Infrastructure Collapses are pretty common: Walls go, roads go, especially when no one takes care of them. Thus in May 2005, a 75-foot-high retaining wall collapsed onto the Henry Hudson Parkway in Upper Manhattan, burying parked cars in mounds of debris and dirt. The road, at least, held. Not so in 1973, when an 80-foot section of the West Side Highway fell onto West Street near Canal Street.

No one was seriously injured in these collapses, but many New Yorkers worry a lot about pieces of the city falling apart.

When pressed for duty, New Yorkers find a way to call out sick:

On Wednesday morning, a pair of women in shorts and tank tops sat on the No. 7 train as it ran from Grand Central to Flushing. They were also AWOL, more or less, and they were planning to watch “a friend of a friend of mine from London who’s playing Rafael Nadal today,” said one of them, Jamie Lewis, 31.

“I sent an e-mail to my boss at midnight, said I’ll be out tomorrow and you can reach me on my cell, and turned my computer off. The markets are crazy and I work at a hedge fund, so I thought I’d escape.”

Ms. Lewis’s friend, who identified herself as Patricia, said she works for an Internet company and added, “I called in sick. Can’t you tell?” She held the back of her hand against her forehead. “I canceled some meetings.”

Others were at Flushing Meadows by dint of a range of alibis and measures, and a lot of these involved the notion that because they were using corporate seats, or accepting the tickets as a gift from clients, or bringing clients, it counted as work anyway.

One man in shorts and loafers gestured to the young woman beside him on the No. 7 train and said that they both worked for banks, “and she’s my client.” This explained his declaration that the Open “is a good corporate event,” but not the fact that he was hugging and kissing the woman throughout the train ride.

Colleen Channer and a friend, who were watching the Nathalie Dechy-Francesca Schiavone match from an upper row of Louis Armstrong Stadium, the better to simultaneously keep an eye on the match between David Nalbandian and Ivan Navarro-Pastor on the adjacent grandstand court, said that she had taken a vacation from her job at a law firm. “But I have a friend who’s an I.T. guy who told his boss last year that he was running a new program, and then he put the program up and came to the Open the rest of the day,” she said.

Baseball people may be superstitious, but baseball writers are just out of control:

If a scholar of Norse mythology had been in the stands of Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night, he or she probably would have advised Yankees fans to not make too much out of the 5-3 victory against the Red Sox.

The result, after all, still left the Yankees trailing Boston by an imposing seven games in the American League East. But more significant, perhaps, was the pesky and distracting squirrel that scampered up and down the right-field foul pole during the game and that, according to Norse mythology, just might have foretold that the Yankees will not prevail over the Red Sox this season.

Believe it or not, the squirrel’s actions closely resembled those of Ratatosk, or “gnawing tooth,” a squirrel in Norse mythology that climbed up and down a tree that represented the world. Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic scholar and poet, recorded the story in his 13th-century work “Prose Edda.”

As the story goes, Ratatosk carried insults as it traveled to opposite ends of the tree, fueling a rivalry between the evil dragon residing at the bottom of the tree and the eagle perched at the top.

. . .

The Yankees said the squirrel came down about 20 minutes after Tuesday’s game and was allowed to go on its way. It joins a cast of baseball creatures that includes the black cat that crossed in front of the Chicago Cubs’ dugout during their ill-fated pennant-race battle with the Mets in 1969 and the bird that Dave Winfield killed with a throw in Toronto in 1983.

Where running and minimalism meet:

Imagine, for a moment, running 3,100 miles — the distance from Queens to Los Angeles plus an additional 300 miles — all around a single city block in Jamaica Hill. This is how 10 men and one woman are spending part of their summer.

The Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race began June 17, and Asprihanal Aalto of Finland was the first to finish Monday at about 10:30 a.m., completing the race in 43 days, four hours, 26 minutes and 32 seconds of pounding the pavement. Yet he was right back at the race course Tuesday morning to offer encouragement to the other runners.

“My heart is still in the race,” Aalto said, checking a photocopied sheet with each runner’s mileage and laps completed per day. “I saw Smarana [Puntigam, of Austria, currently in fourth place] had a bad day yesterday — he only did 108 laps — so I went to talk to him.”

The remaining 10 are on track to complete 5,657 loops of the block around Thomas Edison Career and Technical High School, bounded by the Grand Central Parkway eastbound service road, 168th Street, 164th Place and 84th Avenue. The man in second place, Ayojan Stojanovich, of Serbia, was expected to finish the race Wednesday on day 45, and most runners take about 51 days. A support team tracks the runners’ laps and mileage, offers encouragement and keeps a supply of water and high-fat, high-calorie snacks on the tables at the finish line.

. . .

The runners stay moving from 6 a.m. to midnight every day, jogging, trudging or walking.

“You can’t do this race looking behind you. You have to look deep inside,” [runner Suprabha] Beckjord said.

Abichal Watkins, of Wales, said he had to drop out the first year he applied for the race because his visa expired before he had completed the 3,100 miles.

“I came back the next year to finish,” he said. “This is the longest certified footrace in the world. It’s an opportunity to self-transcend, do something you’ve never done before.”