It’s easy to say, “woe is me, here we go again.” But we can’t… We’ve got to press forward.

– Terry Collins, postgame Wednesday night.

The Mets lost again tonight. You know this. Jon Niese started out strong, looking like he’d give the team the bullpen-saving starting pitching performance it desperately needed. He cruised through the first three, mixing his big hooking curveball with his cutter, striking guys out. And the Mets were scoring runs, too.

Everything appeared pretty awesome until the top of the fifth. With one out, Niese walked Seth Smith, then allowed a single to Jonathan Herrera. He got Carlos Gonzalez to ground out, bringing up Troy Tulowitzki with two down and runners on second and third and Jose Lopez waiting on deck.

Troy Tulowitzki is awesome. He is coming off back to back excellent seasons. He is leading the National League in home runs in this early part of 2011. He doubled earlier in the game, and singled before that.

Jose Lopez is not awesome. He had a 71 OPS+ last year. He can knock a ball out of the park every now and then, but he very rarely gets on base. He grounded out and popped out earlier in the game. He finished the night 0-for-5 with a strikeout.

I’m no fan of the intentional walk and hindsight is 20/20 so I say this with some reluctance, but the Mets could have put the awesome Tulowitzki on first and taken their chances with the not-awesome Jose Lopez. They didn’t. The second pitch Niese threw to the Rockies’ All-Star shortstop was promptly deposited over the right-field fence in the Jody Gerut Memorial Corner, a three-run blast.

The Rockies never relinquished the lead.

Niese, for his part, said he wanted to face Tulowitzki and that — baseball players love this phrase — “you have to tip your hat” to him for taking a pitch off the plate and driving it 340 feet to the opposite field. Collins said he didn’t want to put another runner on base and put his team at bigger risk of a big inning.

Whatever. The Mets fall to 4-7 and further test our patience. The half-full set can point out that they hit pretty well in the game, that the bullpen actually held it together for once, and that with a couple of breaks they easily could have won this one.

But then most baseball games seem to come down to a couple of breaks, and the Mets rarely get them. Collins addressed the players afterward, reminding them that they’re only a couple of bad pitches and bad swings away from being 9-2, telling them to keep pushing and that “it’s time to win games.” This will probably be a big story tomorrow — FURIOUS COLLINS CHEWS OUT LIFELESS METS, or something — but it sounded from the press conference like a vaguely frustrated manager trying to get his team in good spirits after a rough loss.

Collins, upon prompting, admitted he felt the dugout get a bit deflated after Tulowitzki’s homer. Of course, the Mets still managed a run in the 7th for the comeback effort, and the bullpen certainly seemed to have no trouble with motivation. So who knows, really?

The good news, I suppose, is we don’t have much time to sit and stew and let our imaginations run wild after this one; the Mets and Rockies play two tomorrow starting at noon.

You don’t want to hear it and I don’t want to write it, but it’s still early. It was 10 games this morning. It’s 11 games now. You’ve heard it before: Tiny fractions of a long season, 4-7 goes by unnoticed in August, the Mets probably aren’t really this bad.

There’s at least one new sandwich available at Citi Field this year: a fried-chicken sandwich from popular and delicious barbecue purveyor Blue Smoke.

Blue Smoke the restaurant is among my favorite in the city, a regular request for my birthday dinner. The Citi Field installment is responsible for a Hall of Fame pulled-pork sandwich. Fried chicken is amazing. Obviously I had to take the new sandwich out for a spin.

It looks like this:

It’s a fried-chicken breast with lettuce, tomato and some sort of ranch dressing. It cost about $9.

The chicken is great, a very sandwich-friendly chicken breast. This might only be because mine was the first served at the Promenade-level Blue Smoke this evening, but it was crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside and piping hot throughout. The breading has a nice flavor, too — not overwhelmingly salty as some fried chicken can be.

The ranch sauce was tasty. Ranchy. It’s thin by dressing standards, but that’s a good thing: the sandwich isn’t too goopy or anything. The tomato added a little sweetness and some more juiciness without taking away too much from the chicken. The lettuce I could have done without.

What holds this sandwich back from greatness, though, is the brioche bun. And look: the bun works perfectly on the pulled-pork sandwich served at the same establishment, and it’s probably unreasonable to expect a stadium concession to stock multiple styles of bread.

But where the hearty, thick brioche is useful for soaking up barbecue sauce and pork juice from the pulled pork, here it serves no such purpose. The balance of the sandwich is slightly off; the ratio of bread to meat is too high. The result is a few dry, bready bites in an otherwise very good sandwich.

On the whole, I’d say this sandwich is a worthwhile addition to the Citi Field menu but it belongs on the second tier of Citi Field sandwiches, below the Shake Shack burger, the Blue Smoke pulled pork and Mama’s Special.

Speaking of: People don’t give proper credit to Mama’s of Corona. It might seem less interesting to Mets fans now since it’s one of the few holdover specialty food items from Shea, but that doesn’t make it any less delicious. Actually, that should earn it more respect as the OG delicious food option at Mets games. I will do my part to rectify this situation next time I come here.

This hardly merits a whole blog post, but here it is anyway: Though last night’s rainout complicates things for the Mets’ starting rotation, it’s definitely good that the entire bullpen got a night off.

The team will have to work double-duty tomorrow, so this doesn’t change the fact that the Mets will need some better efforts from their starters to take some of the burden off their relievers. But since they used five relievers both Sunday and Monday, the bullpen could use a day of rest.

As for the starters: Adam Rubin points out that Dillon Gee is on turn Sunday, and the Mets could send Ryota Igarashi to Triple-A and call up Gee for a spot start. That plan seems a whole lot better to me than handing a spot start to DJ Carrasco, the other likely option. Gee is better stretched out and more likely than Carrasco to pitch deep into a game, and using Carrasco takes an arm out of the bullpen for a couple days prior to and a couple days following the start.