The New York Mets are a magical act. When you attend their performance, you can’t help but comment, “How did they do that?” And like great prestidigitators, they are masters of distraction.

Look at this, they beg, with Grimace’s hilarious nonsense, purple spikes, ‘OMG’, exaggerated eyeblack, playoff pumpkins and whatever crazy totems of happiness they bow to.

“This,” says 14-year veteran JD Martinez, “is the craziest team I’ve ever been on. Just because of the personality.”

During the 2001 World Series, one of the cleverest banners ever draped on an upper deck flew from the top level of Yankee Stadium, taken from Diamondbacks pitcher Curt Schilling’s rejection of the stadium’s mystique and aura. Mystique and charisma?

“Those are dancers in a nightclub,” Schilling scoffed. Replied the banner: “Mystique and Aura. Appearing at night.’ Touche.

It was the truth in advertising. The Yankees won the middle three games at Yankee Stadium, the second and third on comebacks that bordered on the supernatural.

Saturday night, after the Mets’ final outing ended with another astonishing drop – down 1-0 with six outs to go against the Philadelphia Phillies, they won NLDS Game 1 6-2 – this was a real question from a reporter to Martinez:

“Are mojo or momentum real things?”

Martinez responded, “I mean, I think so.”

Homework assignment for Mets fans must be completed in time for NLDS Game 3 Tuesday at Citi Field: a banner that reads: “Mojo and Momentum. Appears every evening.”

Of course, the magic is no more real than someone being sawn in half in a box. That’s the distraction. It’s not the big pumpkin, Charlie Brown. The truth is more prosaic.

Even though the Mets are baseball’s biggest meme factory, they distract you from the real reason why they are the most dangerous team to play right now. These Mets borrowed from their franchise forebears, the 1986 Mets, one of the greatest rally teams of the modern era. They win with some seriously old-school, ball-in-play, ferocious, unbowed and unyielding batting.

After Phillies ace Zack Wheeler dominated them for seven innings, the Mets welcomed the Philadelphia bullpen with the kind of rally that seems as old-fashioned as typewriters, egg cream sodas and daytime World Series games. They scored five times without an extra base hit.

The staccato rally went as follows: single, walk, single, single, descent, single, single, descent. Three Philadelphia pitchers had to throw 36 pitches to those eight batters, including 19 with two batters in which they never got a third strike. Somewhere Wee Willie Keeler was smiling. The rally was a symphony of beautiful, understated movements: boys continued through the baseball with controlled, flat swings.

“I feel like we just have a good team and everyone just kind of… stubborn,” said Martínez. “Stubborn with their game plans. They just sell the game plan.”

Before the game, Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns attributed the “magic” to devising and executing carefully tailored plans against opposing relievers.

“Everyone has done a great job of making sure they are prepared for who and what they face,” he said.

And then NLDS Game 1 happened at just the right time. The way the Mets play baseball, no one should be allowed into a seat after the fifth inning. This is how their week went:

Monday: Down 7-6 to Atlanta in the ninth. Won.

Tuesday: Down 4-3 against Milwaukee in the fifth. Won.

Thursday: Down 2-0 against Milwaukee in the ninth. Won.

Saturday: Down 1-0 against Philadelphia in the eighth. Won.

It was the Mets’ 44th comeback victory, more than any team this season. They have jumped teams with more four-plus run rallies than any other team. I was trying to get Brandon Nimmo to explain this Mojo and Momentum thing.

“I mean, I guess just being around people like JD and me and Paco (Francisco Lindor),” Nimmo says. “And when you do that and you see people preparing for their at-bats and then having success, everyone gravitates toward what they do. So I think it’s kind of spilling over and becoming more and more the norm with the guys. And then whoever comes in says, ‘Oh, everyone else has these game plans’ and goes over there and it just gets kind of contagious, you know? It’s just something you do.”

The Mets have been on the road for two weeks, 3,500 miles, two champagne parties and one hurricane. They have fused into a tight, unbreakable unit, as the Texas Rangers did during a two-week journey that began at the end of the regular season and extended through two rounds of the playoffs, ultimately leading to them winning the World Series by going undefeated on the road in October.

Somehow, the Mets won Game 1 on a night where Wheeler was simply overwhelming. He induced 30 swings and misses, the most by any pitcher in a postseason game since Gerrit Cole in the 2019 ALDS. The shadows resulting from the 4 p.m. start made hitting treacherous through the first three innings.

“He was throwing planes,” Martinez said. “The balls were flying in all directions.”

Nimmo said, “Wow. The first at bat I couldn’t see the ball. I couldn’t see it out of his hand, and just like when I caught it, it was just a dark black ball. And you say, ‘I don’t know where I’m swinging at here.’ But then there’s some kind of instinct in you that says, ‘Oh, it’s kind of here.’ So you swing.”

Wheeler was just as dirty as the light became more even.

“It’s like, ‘Good luck. We just have to take him out of the game,” Martinez said. ‘We have to find a way to get him out. Because the way he threw the ball was just unbelievable.”

And yet the Mets won again. Mark Vientos, seeing Philadelphia reliever Jeff Hoffman for the first time, stroked a two-strike slider for a game-tying single. Nimmo sliced ​​an 0-and-2 fastball from Matt Strahm for an opposite-field single that gave New York the lead. Later, Jose Iglesias, in his most impressive hit since recording his “OMG” remix with Pitbull (out Oct. 11), singled on the 10th pitch of an at-bat that started 0-and-2.

Teams are not supposed to gather like this in today’s game, especially if they are pitching in relief late in the game. The major league batting average this season in innings seven through nine was .235 – the third lowest ever in a full season. The only seasons that are worse: 2021 and 2022. The Mets don’t care. They’re too crazy to care.

“(Harrison) Bader comes in with a crazy outfit, Pete (Alonso) says some crazy things…” Martinez said, trying to figure out what makes this the craziest team of his life. ‘Don’t know. It’s just… pleasure.”

After Game 2, the Mets finally head home as the two-week Mojo and Momentum Tour returns to headquarters. They send back a different team, albeit one whose packing skills have been as tested as their two-strike approach.

“No, no, no, I couldn’t have been without clothes,” Nimmo said. “I was planning this, just in case. So this is why you have preparation, you know? I brought some suits for the playoffs, just in case and to prepare for the best. And then you see what happens.

“Honestly, none of us even realized how long it took us to win in Milwaukee, and we were like, ‘When was the last time we were home?’ And we were like, ‘Yes, Sunday is two weeks.’

The journey has been long and strange enough for the Mets to have forged an identity: They’re a great comeback team, and they know it. “When you do it that many times,” coach Eric Chavez said, “the guys almost expect it to happen.” The Phillies better stop the Mojo and Momentum Show in Game 2 Sunday or they might get thrown. The Mets are dangerous until someone attacks their stronghold of trust. Game 2 has been as close to a must-win game as you can get for Philadelphia without being a true elimination game.