If you’re just too content with the way your life turned out or if you’re contemplating suicide but lack the perfect motivation, there’s good news. The 1988 Dodgers World Series DVD Collectors set comes out on March 25 on DVD. It contains seven discs that include Game Four of the 1988 NLCS and Game Seven of the 1988 NLCS or as I call it; October 12 1988, “the day that ruined my childhood.”

The mere glimpse at the sets cover, filled me with an instant ache, a repressed memory pushed away by my subconscious only to materialize out of the blue. For an eleven year old Lonestar Met, the 1988 NLCS was Game Seven of 2006 and the last day of 2007 rolled into one excruciating series. I had followed the team all year via the box scores in my local sports paper and watching live on WGN, TBS and the precious times they were a national game. I even ended up down in Houston for a game, catching David Cone pitch in the Astrodome. The Mets looked to win their second World Series of the decade and begin their anticipated National League dynasty.

To this day I’ve never watched one second of film from that series. It still hurts too much. I remember being forced to bed during game six (a school night), after watching the Mets fall behind early and getting nothing going on the board, I left for my bedroom with the Mets trailing six to nothing. I cunningly and subtly switched on my clock radio and found the broadcast, hoping, nay, praying the Mets had one more miracle left over from 1986. Even down to the last out, I stood on my bed, still dressed in my complete Mets outfit, my fingers crossed up against my Mets pennant. Unfortunately, Hershiser was untouchable and there was no two out hit to keep the inning alive, much less anything equivalent to a little roller up along first, and the Mets season was finished.

I think at that moment my baseball heart was crushed. I was still a Mets fan, though not nearly as fanatical. Nothing remained as great as it was on October 12 when the Mets looked to be a dynasty in the making. Instead, the Mets went dormant for the next eleven years, putting lousy teams filled with quick fix free agents and unexciting players until 1999 when, unexpectedly, I would make my peace with the same man that tormented my team eleven years earlier would join the Mets mid season and make one of the most exciting playoff runs imaginable.

I haven’t watched the DVD set, nor do I want to, but since it was one of the most disturbing memories in my young life and it’s seared into my brain, I can review it for you:

Put that on the box.

I’ve always wondered why the 1988 NLCS isn’t more of a scrutinized moment in the lexicon of Mets history the way Rogers’ Ball Four, Carlos’s looking KO and even Glavine’s soiling of the mattress are viewed as watershed moments in franchise history. Was it that after 99, the Mets would make the Series the next year? Is it still to painful to recount the 1988 NLCS; the last moment in the sun, an abrupt and unwanted goodbye to the heroes of 86 and a steady and all too rapid decline into a decade of mediocre to pathetic baseball? Is its lack of notoriety stem from being committed against an usual group of villains, ones not clad in pinstripes or wielding tomahawks?