The Mets were off today and I promised not to write about Alex Cora any more, so here’s a random story:

A grisly 1950 Long Island Rail Road crash cost Rockville Centre, N.Y. its best shot at a single transcendent local legend. The head-on collision, which killed 32 commuters, so spooked Sandy Koufax’s parents that they scooped up the young southpaw and moved him back to Brooklyn, rendering his four-year stint in the village little more than a footnote in the town’s history.

But the accident prompted the LIRR to elevate the rails in Rockville Centre, and ultimately led to the creation of a more fleeting local legend, nearly half a century later.

Mike Ryan didn’t go to my elementary school and he wasn’t in my grade — he was a class ahead of me. But I knew all about him, because every kid in the town did. In every schoolyard, hours were passed recounting tales of his athletic grandeur, like we were old men in a barber shop, only we were 12. It only makes sense if you saw the kid play.

By sixth grade, every kid in town had his own story about the time he got a hit off Mike Ryan. Braggarts said they lined a triple into the gap, or something similarly unlikely. Funny kids like me said they closed their eyes and stuck the bat out and looped a single over the shortstop’s head.

None of them were true. I’m almost certain that Mike Ryan never allowed a hit in his entire Little League pitching career. He may have walked a few batters or occasionally beaned some unfortunate soul, but there’s no way anyone ever made solid contact with his fastball.

And for a 12-year-old who couldn’t have been playing competitive sports for more than a few years, he certainly had a lot of Paul Bunyan myths around him.

I’m pretty sure the legends were perpetuated by the fact that half the kids didn’t even show up when they found out they were slated to face Mike Ryan’s team, for fear they might actually have to bat against him, or d him up in basketball.

One story held that he dunked in a CYO basketball game in sixth grade. Sounds crazy, I know. But we believed it.

The other centered on those tracks.

Rockville Centre has a few Little League fields, but the nicest — the showcase, where the annual Long Island regional finals were held — is Hickey Field, right off Sunrise Highway.

The now-elevated LIRR tracks run along a concrete trestle until just behind Hickey’s left field fence, where the trestle runs into a dirt hill that supports the tracks at the elevated level until they emerge again a few hundred yards down the road in Baldwin.

And though no one ever could provide a first-hand account, the greatest and most persistent Mike Ryan legend held that he put one over the train tracks at Hickey, a shot I’d estimate at easily, I don’t know, 320 feet? 330? Too far for a 12-year-old, for sure.

Ryan’s Achilles heel was that, in addition to being a great athlete, he was about the nicest guy in the world, plus girls thought he was beautiful. By the time high school rolled around, I guess he realized he found the comforts of women and weed a lot more fun than the pressures of being everyone’s local hero, and so never did much to make the most of his absurd talents.

They were still enough to land him a spot deep in the varsity basketball team’s rotation in his senior year, though. And once, late in a blowout, he got an open look on a breakaway and threw one down. The place erupted.

“He’s still got it!” someone yelled.

Later, when a few of my friends and I were back from college putting around for the summer, we went to Hickey Field to play home-run derby on the short fences there.

My buddies are a pretty strong lot, and the longest shots were hit up the hill near the tracks and just about to the tracks, but never quite over the tracks. So we joked about how we used to believe Mike Ryan actually hit one over the train tracks in Little League.

As we did, one of the town’s orange parks and recreation trucks pulled up. We assumed we were getting kicked off the field. My friends started collecting the baseballs as I started walking over to the pickup, planning to give the guy bluster about how we weren’t doing anything wrong.

The truck door opened and Mike Ryan got out, hair unkempt and eyes bloodshot, a bit tanner and thinner than we’d last seen him.

“Mind if I take a few cuts?”

For a local legend?

“Not at all.”

But it wasn’t a few cuts.

I swear this on my life: My buddy lobbed one in, and the very first pitch Ryan saw, he drilled over the tracks.

“Oh… sorry about your ball.”

Nice guy, like I said.

And as he ambled back into the truck, retiring forever into local lore, my buddy, from the mound, spoke up:

“He’s still got it!”