Howard Simmons/New York Daily News
Mets starting pitcher Johan Santana winds up and delivers no-hitter Friday night at Citi Field.
Everywhere you turned at Citi Field on Saturday, someone else wanted to tell you where they had been on Friday night, or why their voice sounded a bit hoarse. Security guards, elevator operators, fans hanging around four hours before gametime, they all wanted to bask in the glow of Johan Santana’s no-hitter.
So even if you knew how crazy 50 years without a no-no had made the Mets’ family and their fans, the sense of giddiness at the ballpark made you step back and consider the enormity of what Santana had done for the franchise.
“Even I’m a little bit overwhelmed by the reaction,’’ Jay Horwitz, the Mets’ PR man forever, said on Saturday. “It’s almost that ‘Now I can die in peace’ type of thing.’’
By comparison to someone like Horwitz, a Met-lifer, Santana has been around here for about five minutes. But it was clear he understood the significance of his achievement when he referenced the long wait during his postgame interview on the field.
And then on Saturday, he compared it to the feeling in 2004, when he felt he had won his first Cy Young Award not just for himself but for all of Venezuela, his native country.
“It was very special,’’ he said, “because it meant a lot to my whole country, and throwing the no-hitter was very special because I know Mets’ fans, they were waiting for it. To happen like this, it was very nice and it is theirs, too.’’
Yes, if ever there was a communal no-hitter, this was it. The circumstances just made it all the more dramatic, with Terry Collins agonizing over the decision to allow Santana to throw 134 pitches to complete the feat.
A day later, Santana seemed very much at peace over it. He said he felt fine physically, but then again, he was still running on adrenaline on Saturday, having barely slept from the time he’d left the ballpark on Friday night.
“Less than 60 minutes,’’ he said with a laugh, when asked sleep. “That’s ok. It was just a great night. I’ll sleep tonight.’’
He said he never considered that pushing his post-surgical shoulder to 134 pitches might be risking injury or compromising his effectiveness in the coming weeks. It’s just not the way he’s wired, after all.
“Coming back (from shoulder-capsule surgery), there were a lot of question marks around me,’’ Santana said. “Whether it’s velocity, whether it’s ‘can he come back and compete again?’
“But I’ve got my heart, and I know how to do my things, and I always love to compete. I always find ways to compete. So more than risking anything, my thought was, ‘I have the opportunity to make this happen and I’m not gonna let it get away. It might be once in a lifetime. ‘’
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