“All sporting memories,” Roger Angell once wrote, “are suspect — the colors too bright, the players and their feats magnified in our wishful recapturing.” Surely (and especially if the Mets win this year), children who attended yesterday’s home opener at Shea Stadium, the last in the history of that ballpark, will one day regale their own children with highly wishful recapturings. For now, I would bet, every one of those children is irate.

While it’s almost too neat and convenient to be true, it remains that yesterday’s starter, Oliver Perez, embodies his team and its many contradictions. As often frustrating as brilliant, and with a nearly singular ability to leave one with the impression he’s done far worse than he actually has, Perez, like his team, put some of his best and worst on display yesterday. In the end, the Mets, in the loss to Philadelphia, looked far less like favorites than they ought to.

It’s hard to lay too much on a pitcher who threw 5.2 scoreless innings against a team that led the National League with 892 runs scored last year. Perez was aggressive, changed speeds on his slider effectively, and threw everything with a darting tilt that left such hitters as Ryan Howard and Carlos Ruiz looking at times as if they were trying to use their bats as flyswatters. He also walked 45-year-old pitcher Jamie Moyer, who was trying to lay down a sacrifice bunt, and quickly exited the game in the sixth after a sequence in which he walked Pat Burrell, went to 3–0 on Jayson Werth, balked Burrell to second, and then threw a skittery fourth ball that surprised catcher Brian Schneider, who let it roll toward the backstop.

Perez’s capacity to shut down a strong lineup and melt down at the same time is much of what makes him a delightful pitcher to watch. He neither took the loss nor was at all responsible for it yesterday, but it was impossible to avoid hanging a bit of the blame on him. Five and two-thirds scoreless innings is a very good performance, after all, but eight scoreless would have been far better, and as it turned out was what it likely would have taken to win. Perennial goat Scott Schoeneweis kicked the game away in the seventh, and the ever-less impressive Jorge Sosa and Aaron Heilman followed with more gas for the fire. Only a star turn from Perez would have done much to keep the ball away from them.

Is it fair to expect much more from Perez, who has now made two starts and allowed no runs? Not really, but in a wider sense it likely is, at least in the sense that if there’s a job to be done, someone has to do it, whether or not it’s their responsibility.

Much of the reason Perez embodies the Mets so well is that he’s a very good player on a team with few very good players. Mostly, the team comprises Hall of Fame-caliber talents in their primes and ballast. This leaves the fate of the team largely in the hands of players such as Perez, Heilman, and John Maine, who have the potential to play like true stars but are also capable of periods of real ineptitude. If they can exceed expectations, they’ll not only help the team by performing well, but by keeping Sosa, Schoeneweis, and company from doing too much damage. It may not be exactly fair to demand they do this, but what are the alternatives? Are Johan Santana and David Wright supposed to start picking up the slack?

The attentive reader will note here that Jose Reyes might be asked to pick up some of it, and this is true. If Perez showed yesterday both why people think he might evolve into a true no. 2 starter this year and why they don’t, Reyes showed why no one has any idea what to make of him or his prodigious talent. Hacking at various slop offered up by the ancient Moyer, whose fastball rarely breaks 80 mph these days, and watching all sorts of barely bending breaking balls sail past, Reyes did not at all look like the next iteration of Barry Larkin, as he has for much of the last two years, but rather like that of Cristian Guzman, the appalling Washington shortstop.

Anyone can look like anything in 24 at bats, but one of the main benefits of true discipline, which is what Reyes seemed, up until about last August 31, to have developed, is that it doesn’t slump. Feebly waving at half the pitches he shouldn’t be offering at, and rolling the other half down toward third, Reyes, in his first six games, has looked outright lost. He’ll come out of it, probably sooner rather than later, but until he does he’ll leave us wondering how suspect are our memories of that brilliant player who looked, for a moment that lasted months, like the better half of his side of the infield. He’ll also be doing his part to make sure that the Mets need greatness, rather than mere goodness , from those few very talented players on whom their season may depend.

tmarchman@nysun.com