Tom Seaver’s wife Nancy fittingly got to hear one last roar for Mets legend

They were a team from Day 1: he the handsome world-class athlete, she the beautiful blonde who was always at his side. Sometimes that was in the stands at Shea Stadium, where the cameras always seemed to find Nancy Seaver. In Tom Seaver’s finest hour as a Met, July 9, 1969, in the moment after he lost his imperfect game in the ninth inning the Channel 9 cameras caught Seaver’s slumped shoulders and cut to Nancy’s tears.

Sometimes that meant the cover of a magazine: McCall’s, People, Esquire. Sometimes it meant they were endorsing products together. Always they were together. They were both 22 when they took on the big city together, back in 1967.

Friday afternoon, one last time, they said goodbye to the city, to the franchise, to the fans. Together.

“Hello Tom,” Nancy said. “It’s so nice to have you where you belong.”

Not long after that moment, the blue tarpaulin came off the statue in the Citi Field parking lot and there, for the world to see, for Mets fans to enjoy eternally starting with their descent down the 7 train platform, was Tom Seaver, mid delivery, the stainless steel baseball gripped tight between his bronze fingertips, his right knee forever smudged in stainless-steel mud as he drops and drives one more fastball past the world.

For a half-an-eye-blink there was quiet, followed by a gasp. And then a roar, loud enough to be heard in all the precincts of baseball New York that Tom Seaver touched while he drove his team to the World Series and himself to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

The Mets were surely going to honor the mood of the moment, and they did, crushing the Diamondbacks 10-3, providing the kind of offensive outburst that Seaver himself sure could have used all those times he was nursing 1-0 and 2-1 leads. It helps that Arizona is the closest major league baseball can come to a perfect home-opener foe, a team that lost 110 games last year and might use that as a baseline figure this year.

They are the perfect homecoming opponent.

But the Mets, when they play as they did Friday, are capable of making a lot of teams look foolish. They hit four home runs, one from each side by Francisco Lindor. They got six strong innings from Chris Bassitt, who allowed only one earned run yet, even so, saw the Mets’ ERA among their starting pitchers rise to 1.32.

For the overwhelming part of the day, it was a joyous, feel-good party among the sold-out crowd of 43,820, ninth-biggest in the stadium’s history.

(There were exceptions, of course. During the statue ceremony Steve Cohen — who was greeted with a deafening roar, included in his remarks thanks to the Wilpon and Katz families, and the boos couldn’t have been louder if he’d instead announced he was selling the statue to Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park. And poor Sean Reid-Foley’s two-run misadventure in the ninth wasn’t exactly greeted with a peaceful zen by the fans still in the house.)

But the fans also stood during pregame introductions — still surely touched by the feel-good Seaver ceremony and the tribute to the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robison breaking the color barrier — gave Lindor a warm, extended greeting. It did not go unnoticed.

“They’re waiting to embrace you,” Buck Showalter said of New York’s baseball fans.

“That felt amazing, to be welcomed by the greatest fan base out there,” Lindor said after his 2-for-3 day with two walks and three runs scored. “It felt great to hear my home crowd cheer us on and cheer on the other guys.”

There is, of course, one man who knows those cheers, who understands them, better than anyone. On the dark day he was traded in 1977 he broke down crying in a news conference trying to verbalize what that felt like: “I’ve given them a great many thrills. And they’ve been equally returned.”

Friday, 55 years and three days after making his debut as a Met, almost 39 seasons after throwing his last pitch as a Met, they were returned, again. Seaver wasn’t there to hear them. But Nancy was. As it should be. Once a team, always a team.