Everything about Wednesday night's game made it feel like a classic stomach punch of a loss for the Mets.
Down a run, there was a bad call that went against them in the eighth inning and it felt like the forces were conspiring against the Mets the way they had so many times in the past. Daniel Murphy followed that bad call with a game-tying home run, but the Mets handed the lead back to the Nationals the next inning to make it seem even more likely that the deck was stacked against them.
These Mets didn't roll over and die, though. They rallied for four runs in the top of the ninth, including a two-run double by Murphy, and wound up with a 6-3 victory to extend their winning streak to six games.
But let's get back to that bad call because that turned out to be a pretty big moment in ways that no one could have expected. Jose Reyes slid into third with what looked like a no doubter of a triple when the umpire suddenly called him out for allegedly pulling his hand off the bag.
Watch the replay and you'll see that the umpire was actually the one off base. You'll also see Reyes throw one of the great tantrums of all time with somehow didn't lead to an ejection as he did everything in his power to let the ump know that he totally blew the call.
In the past, that kind of lost opportunity crushed the Mets and led to yet another loss. This team fed off the energy that Reyes showed, though, and every Met credited the shortstop with inspiring them after the game.
It's hard to read too much into one argument after one bad call, but it was hard not to see a line in the sand being drawn during Reyes's rant. It's an extension of everything Terry Collins talked about before the season.
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No longer are we just going to sit down and accept it when bad things happen to us. We're going to fight back and fight back and fight back until we find a way to ultimately prevail.
That's a big change for the Mets and, so far, it seems to agree with them.
Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter and he is also a contributor to Pro Football Talk.
