Carlos Beltran simply walked away, and sadly for Mets fans, that’s all that was left for them to do, too. Leaving my seat, stunned by the way game seven of the National League Championship Series transpired last Thursday, a boy, maybe 10 years old, sitting two rows back from me was crying in his father’s arms.

“There’s no crying in baseball,” the father told his son. And traditionally he’d be right, but game seven was a different kind of game.

It was the kind that gets under a Mets fans’ ribs and sticks, the kind that if you were to think about it walking down the street, you might be liable to start muttering curses uncontrollably, to the fright of those around you. It was the kind of game where you’re just left thinking, “what if?”

It’s not that the Mets lost, not solely. It’s to whom they lost, a team that finished the regular season two games above .500 and 14 games worse than the Mets did, and how they lost, in a game seven at home where the Mets had several opportunities but could not muster a hit in seven straight innings. Where the best player on the team struck out looking to end the game with the bases loaded and a rookie pitcher on the mound.

The Mets had also loaded the bases in the sixth inning, after Endy Chavez’s miraculous glove work in the top half of the frame — a catch that should’ve gone down in history as having propelled the Mets to a pennant — but, with two outs to work with, were unable to plate any runners.

And don’t glance over Oliver Perez’s performance or the aborted ninth inning comeback; a season of so many accomplishments for the Mets was not supposed to end like this, not when they were so close to the Promised Land. It didn’t really hit me until Yadier Molina, game seven’s hero with a two-run home run in the ninth inning off of Aaron Heilman, darted toward the mound after Beltran’s strikeout — it was really over.

And if the Cardinals win the World Series by beating the Tigers, a team that also should be superior to the Redbirds, Mets fans will kick themselves, knowing that if the Cardinals could beat the American League’s best, then also, probably, could the Mets.

The offseason will be exciting, a time for the Mets to attempt to improve on a great season with a sour ending, but the future brings no promises. It’s a long winter.

The Mets will be better for their loss next season, with the younger players and even some older veterans gaining postseason experience to put under their belts, while all returning players will have the disappointment of this year’s loss to motivate them even farther into October.

But game seven will always linger.

Tom Hanks said it in “A League of Their Own”: there’s not supposed to be any crying in baseball. But even I wish I could have just hid my head behind my father — who was next to me — and if not cried, at least screamed.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Mets were too good this season, too special. Until another pennant banner hangs in Shea, the failure of game seven will hang over it instead.