Two days as a walking cliché

The Mets are down two games to none in the World Series. The first game was a heart-breaker, the second more of a slow march towards doom. That we have the opportunity to bemoan a lack of World Series success is a very good problem to have, but it didn't make that second loss sting any less, especially not when Matt Harvey and Jacob deGrom started the first two games of the series. A two-game deficit isn't a death sentence for the 2015 Mets, but it is, obviously, the worst-case scenario.

Try searching for a way to frame this all in a positive light for the Mets, and at some point along the way, you'll hit upon the late Yogi Berra's signature line, which he said mid-season as manager of the 1973 Mets.

It's a cliché and has been for a long time, but it fits. The Mets are in a bad spot, yet they're within a couple of wins of being in a very good spot. If Noah Syndergaard and Steven Matz can do better than Harvey and deGrom did, or if the Mets' lineup scores a bunch of runs against Yordano Ventura and Chris Young, the series could have a decidedly different look on Sunday morning.

In the opposite extreme, it could all be over by then, too. Thus far, the Mets' overpowering strikeout pitchers haven't been striking out the contact-prone Royals, feeding right into the popular expectations about the series. Kansas City's inferior starting pitching hasn't been exposed. And the Mets, a team that had not been behind in a series in this playoff run until it lost Game 1 of the World Series, are one loss from standing on the verge of the offseason.

But we'll spend today and much of tomorrow telling ourselves and others—there sure are a lot of new baseball experts out there these days, aren't there?—that the 2015 Mets have four wins left in them, whether we really believe it or not. You might feel lame for going back to it, and there might be actual ways to make the argument that the Mets will pull it all off. But it's simple, it's accurate, it's available, and you are tired from all the late nights.

"It ain't over till it's over."