Trip Is Mets’ First to Boston Since ’86

It’s been nearly 12 years since the New York Mets’ last game at Fenway Park put the Boston Red Sox one win away from a championship that never came.

Now the Mets return for a three-game series starting Friday night. And the Red Sox streak has reached 79 seasons without a World Series title.

“I don’t remember anything,” Jim Rice said Thursday about that last matchup at Fenway, a 4-2 Red Sox victory in 1986. “You can’t live in the past.”

Rice, now Boston’s batting coach, tripled and scored a run in Game 5 as Bruce Hurst pitched a complete game, giving Boston a 3-2 lead in the Series. Rice isn’t the only one with a hazy recollection of that game.

That might be because few people can forget Game 6, one of the most memorable in World Series history.

That’s the one in which the Mets, trailing by two runs and one strike from elimination, scored three runs in the bottom of the 10th, the last on Bill Buckner’s error, and won 6-5. They also won Game 7.

“Those are some painful memories,” said Lou Gorman, the Red Sox general manager at the time and now a team consultant.

The Series began with great promise for the Red Sox. They won the first two games in New York then returned home for three at Fenway before going back to Shea Stadium for the last two games.

Gorman thought they wouldn’t have to make that last trip.

“I thought we’d win it at home. I thought this would be the ultimate to win it in your own ballpark,” he said. “‘Then, of course, we lose those two games at Fenway.”