Pete Alonso delivers his forever moment with biggest Mets swing of career

It took a second for it to register, no matter where you were. At American Family Field, the party had already begun, 41,594 long-suffering Brewers fans already setting aside a three-hour TV bloc for Saturday afternoon, live from Philadelphia. In the lower bowl at Citi Field, 896 miles away, a watch party stood sentry in silence, hoping for a miracle.

In a million homes, people pulled on rally caps, fastened themselves into uncomfortable positions on the couch, anything to pull an inside straight.

And off the bat, it didn’t seem possible. It didn’t seem real. In Milwaukee, they were still roaring. In Flushing, they were still praying. You? Maybe you saw Pete Alonso’s reaction as soon as he made contact and — OMG — it looked like he knew something. A smile started to form, an arm started to raise.

“YEAH!” he shouted.

And by the time the ball landed over the right-field fence, amid a gaggle of arms that wanted no part of catching it, 367 feet away, suddenly up was down and inside was out. American Family Field was overrun by an aching quiet. Citi Field was New Year’s Eve.

With one forever swing of his bat, Alonso had turned 0-2 down into 3-2 up. He had somehow warded off the winter and guaranteed at least five more days of summer. He’d gone all Roy Hobbs, is what he did, even if he spared the light towers. You could almost hear the music.

“I’m just happy,” Alonso would say, a few minutes after this 4-2 clincher was over, after the Mets punched a most unlikely ticket to Philly, for what promises to be a fascinating N.L. Division Series, “that I came through for the boys.”

He came through for them all right, and you could see the 10,000-pound anvil fall from his shoulders as he took the 360-foot trot around the basepaths. The boys had been having a blast the past few days, and it seemed everyone had lent a hand to the cause except for the first baseman.

As one Met after another stepped up and delivered a string of enormous hits — Francisco Lindor! Brandon Nimmo! Mark Vientos! Even Jesse Winker! — Alonso could only scratch out the odd broken-bat bloop. His walk year had turned into a limp year.

And descended ever deeper into the weeds Thursday. In three at-bats, he’d flied out, popped out and struck out, and then in what might have been his final bow as a Met, he’d dropped a foul pop-up in the seventh, when the Brewers seized what seemed likely to be an insurmountable 2-0 lead.

By the ninth, the scene in Milwaukee was frenetic. The scene at Citi was funereal. Into the game trotted Devin Williams, he of the 1.25 ERA and 0.969 WHIP and 45 percent strikeout rate and perhaps the sport’s filthiest changeup. He’d allowed all of three earned runs in an injury-shortened season that began July 28.

He’d allowed one home run.

Carlos Mendoza thought to himself: “Let’s get a guy on. Give ourselves a chance.”

Then he noticed something else: Alonso clutching his bat, fixing his batting helmet, due fourth in the inning. And had another thought:

“We’ve got to get the big guy a swing.”

Lindor somehow drew a stubborn walk, one more jewel to a final two months in which he’s played at as high a level as any Mets position player has ever played. Nimmo — another who’d refused to let the Mets season end in Atlanta three days earlier — singled.

Damned if the big guy wasn’t about to get a swing.

“In this game, in life, you never know,” Nimmo said. “You just never know.”

Here came Alonso. You didn’t need a PhD in body language to see he’d been pressing, battling himself, in agony. And it wasn’t just the millions of dollars that were flying out the window with each feeble at-bat as he hit .143 with no extra-base hits during the final road trip through Milwaukee and Atlanta, with only one hit in eight at-bats in this series.

It was deeper than that.

“Pete wants to do so much,” Lindor said. “He wanted to be a part of this. And we kept telling him: You will. You’ll have your moment. You’ll get your chance.”

Here was his moment. Here was his chance. Williams, who’d trotted out of the bullpen looking 9 feet tall, suddenly looked a little shaken. His manager, Pat Murphy, would say: “We know in that situation, all it takes is one pitch and it’s 6-4-3 and we go home.”

But Alonso had been saying the same thing for days: One pitch, one swing, can change everything. Mendoza had repeated that after Wednesday’s bruising loss: “Pete,” he’d said, “is always only one swing away from something special.”

He worked the count to 3-and-1. Hitter’s count. Williams came with his bread-and-butter, and he might not have thrown three others like this all season: fat, hittable, way too much of the plate. For weeks, when Alonso swung at such pitches, he’d foul them back.

He didn’t foul this one back.

“Soak it up,” Steve Cohen told Alonso after, the owner admitting he’d already made his way to the clubhouse to offer condolences and so heard the reaction to the home run before he actually saw it 7 seconds later on TV. “Great players rise to the occasion.”

Alonso had risen to this one, and one swing resonated everywhere — in Milwaukee, in Flushing, and wherever you were, however you reacted, whatever you felt. OMG.