Prepare the 2019 Mets’ eulogy

The people told you all you needed to know. There were 37,054 of them at Citi Field on a mostly sunny Sunday, less than a week shy of summer, and they were trying their best to honor the calendar. This is still supposed to be a time of hope, of optimism, of looking forward. The baseball summer hasn’t even started yet, not really.

So when Todd Frazier dunked a ball behind first base Sunday afternoon, bottom of the ninth, one out, Mets down a run, the people let out a hopeful roar.

What other choice did they have? They know the schedule better than the players do. They know what lies ahead. They know that unless something drastic happens with their baseball team, the next time they see them here it could well feel like the bottom of the season.

The bottom of the abyss. So there was that hopeful roar.

And then there was the doleful sigh that came next, Wilson Ramos slamming a ball on the ground toward shortstop, a textbook 6-4-3 double play to end the game, to give the Cardinals a 4-3 win, to close out two weeks in New York when the Mets could easily have gone 9-3 and instead went 6-6.

Afterward, the players dressed slowly, and who could blame them? What awaits is a three-city, 11-day road trip through Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia, 11 games against three of the National League’s best teams. The Mets will actually pass the midway point of their schedule on the trip. If it felt like something died when Ramos rolled into that game-killing twin-killing … well, that might be true.

It might be the whole season soon to be lying in state.

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All of this before the Fourth of July. Goodness.

Someone asked Mickey Callaway if this was a “watershed” moment for his team, and Callaway said no, and that would be an accurate answer if he substituted a word like “critical” or “crucial” or “essential.”

But Callaway, Stepford Manager, didn’t say any of that.

Instead, he said: “I wouldn’t ever use that terminology. We need to get to .500 and need to add past that. We have the chance to do that on this road trip. We’ll play good baseball and get that done.”

And look, we get it: It’s not on the manager to properly frame what the coming week and a half could mean. That ought to be obvious to each Met who will step foot on the turf in Atlanta come Monday night. It is certainly clear to Frazier, who has been around long enough that he won’t waste anyone’s time calling this stretch of games anything other than what it is.

“Every game from here on in is big,” said Frazier. “We have to make up some ground. We know we’re better than this. And we have to figure it out quickly.”

The Mets trail the Braves by 7 ½ games, and the Braves certainly know that taking two out of three could well give them the arm’s length they’ll need to permanently cross the Mets off as potential threats in the East. They are also playing magnificent baseball right now, nine wins in their past 10 games.

The Cubs are the Cubs: alternating between dangerous and deadly, especially at Wrigley Field, where Chicago is 14-2 against the Mets in the regular season going back to 2014. And the Phillies — who got a good humbling in Atlanta this weekend — are still the deepest team in the division.

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An optimist (like Callaway) would be tempted to say: “Well, if we’re ever going to get things turned around, this is the time to do it.”

A realist (which is to say, just about everyone else who has watched this team scuffle for 71 games and has seen its torturous six-week dance with .500) would say: “Uh, oh.”

“We put ourselves in position to win, and we didn’t win as many games as we’d like,” Callaway said of the weekend series with the Cardinals in which the Mets blew three leads and did everything within their power to blow a fourth. And as Rich Kotite used to say about the Jets once upon a time, week after hideous week: “We played hard enough to win.”

There isn’t a column for that, of course. Wins and losses are all that matter. The people at Citi Field on Sunday desperately wanted one for the left side of the hyphen because they know what’s coming. And they fear that the competitive portion of their baseball season might have died with Wilson Ramos’ ground ball to shortstop.