Dane Cook, no longer the poster boy just for bad comedy, but for this year’s MLB playoffs and cruel irony as well, opened a commercial for the Mets’ October run with these words: ‘Last year’s [NLCS] loss is not forgotten. This year’s team is about redemption.’

The only things being redeemed at Shea this month are the thousands of dollars worth of playoffs tickets.

A seven-game lead dissipated in 17 days ‘ it’s historical and it’s phenomenal. A remarkable story that, when retold, should be told how it was: a Phillies’ ascent via the Mets’ self-destruction, and not vice versa.

It was the Mets’ sense of entitlement from last season that begot their lack of humility this season. After missing out on the NL pennant so narrowly in 2006, these supposedly improved, wiser Mets ‘ now playoff-tested warriors ‘ thought they were guaranteed to make the World Series.

And they apparently thought last year’s NL East championship banner hanging in right field served as a ‘Go straight to the playoffs’ card in 2007.

‘I think at times we can get a little careless,’ said Carlos Delgado on WFAN during the collapse. ‘We’ve got so much talent I think sometimes we get bored.’

Even if the top candidate for Mets whipping boy of the year, manager Willie Randolph, didn’t have a handle on his team in the final two weeks of the season, he had a handle on what happened.

‘This is just a tough life lesson in baseball,’ Randolph told reporters. ‘Any time you have an opportunity to finish the deal and don’t capitalize on it, it will come back to haunt you. And it sure did with us. The bottom line is that we spit away an opportunity to win the division. It’s going to be a tough winter living with that.’

Even if Tom Glavine, whose initials some might take to stand for ‘tomahawk’ and ‘gutless,’ couldn’t get out of the first inning Sunday, he knew what message to take away from a Mets season that wasn’t.

‘We obviously had an opportunity to win this thing and we let it get away from us,’ Glavine told reporters. ‘I’m sure it’s something that is going to take a while for all of us to get over. It just goes to show you that in this game you can’t take anything for granted.’

So what comfort can anyone who cares for the Mets ‘ be it the fans, the players or Fred Wilpon’s grand-nephew whose lunch money will probably be taken by the Yankees fans at school all week ‘ find in that same lesson?

That at least, if nothing else, entering an off-season of shame, you can safely wait ’til next year. Fifty years ago, your New York National League baseball team would have been headed to California, and you’d have no one to lament.

And they’re still better than the Royals.