I never got around to the Mets season summary (perhaps that will come), but I had to put in my two cents about last night's NLCS Game 5 between the Cardinals and the Astros.

Due to my current teaching life, I no longer stay up to all hours of the night playing video games and watching whatever sporting event that is on TV (like the old days of Arena Football, on the crappy ESPN2). Therefore, I went to bed last night with the Cardinals still winning in the seventh inning, 2-1. That's when the Astros came back, on a Lance Berkman homer, I hear, to take a 4-2 lead.

They took that lead into the ninth, with their invincible closer on the hill, Brad Lidge. All we've heard about this post-season is how Lidge didn't blow a lead for the Astros all season until the final Friday of the regular season. He looked a little shaky on Sunday, but got one of the best-turned double plays of all-time to end the game with the tying run on third, so that had to make him feel only more invincible.

So Lidge strikes out the first two batters of the ninth, then goes to 3-2 on David Eckstein. Eckstein rolls a single into left field. Then Lidge walks Jim Edmonds. Then Albert Pujols launches a bomb to left field, the Cardinals take a 5-4 lead, and go on to win. Now the series shifts to Saint Louis Wednesday and Thursday (if necessary), and everyone thinks the Astros are dead and buried.

I hate to promote the guy, but Bill Simmons wrote a very good article about how the Astros and their fans must feel right now on ESPN.com. (I don't like Simmons because I'm jealous - there, I've said it, OK. I'm jealous at what he does for a living.) Simmons knows the pain, because he is a Red Sox fan, and his comparisons between this game and Game 6 of the 1986 World Series are dead-on.

I'm not so sure that the Astros will collapse, though. I still am not totally sold on the Cardinals - I don't know that they'll be able to close this out. But they really have a home field working for them - the Cardinals fans are going to be nuts about having at least one more, and possibly two more, home games this post-season, and the Astros are facing a very tough go the next one (or two) nights. I do feel, though, that they're capable of putting Monday night's game behind them and closing out the series on Wednesday. We'll see.

I worry, though, about Brad Lidge. His situation too closely resembles Donnie Moore, and we all know what happened to him. I don't think Lidge will do anything drastic personally, but I wonder how this will affect him professionally. He was so dominant this season (and even last year) - I wonder how he handles this type of adversity, on such a big stage. I don't know anything about him, so I don't know his makeup - but I want to root for him to come back and pitch well.

So I should talk about the way I found out about this, just so I can answer those "Where were you when....?" questions. I was sleeping. We talked about that already. But when I woke up, and turned on ESPNEWS, the bottom right corner didn't say "Astros advance to first ever World Series", so I figured the Cardinals won. I was more surprised when I saw the Indianapolis Colts' score. But I waited for the NL spot on the crawl, and saw the final score was 5-4. Still didn't think much of it, other than the fact that it didn't end 2-1. Then it says, "Pujols GW 3-run HR", and I'm doing the math, and thinking "Wow." Then they show the highlights, and the situation was just - and I'm going to use a word here that is so overused today that it has lost some meaning, but here it is applicable - UNBELIEVABLE. This is unbelievable, people. Other stuff that gets tagged "Unbelievable" is really quite believable. It needs to be used less.

Anyway, I love hearing stuff about the 1986 World Series and how the champagne was all ready to go and the podium for the trophy presentation was all set up for the Red Sox in Game 6, and then it had to be all torn down. I'd like to hear about the stuff that went on at Minute Maid Park on Monday night - at least they had another half-inning to get things done, since the Astros had to hit in the bottom half.

At the very least, this NLCS just went from insignificant to somewhat exciting. I'll try to write about it on Thursday.