It doesn't get any better than the first Braves-Mets series

The Braves come to Citi Field this weekend for four games that will end April and then open May in the National League East. One thing, though, hasn’t changed since last October: The Braves are still ahead of the Mets.

It doesn’t mean they will be by Monday afternoon, when this series ends. Or that the Braves will be better by this October. It’s only two games in the loss column separating the two teams as they head into Friday night’s game. But for now, the Braves are still kings of the hill in the East.

The Mets still don’t have Justin Verlander, who isn’t scheduled to join the season until next week in Detroit. Max Scherzer won’t pitch this weekend, as he continues to serve out a suspension because of too much sticky substance on his pitching hand in Los Angeles last week. So, the Mets are currently diminished. Still: This weekend sees the resumption of a rivalry as good and real as any in baseball right now.

Both the Mets and Braves won 101 games last season. The Mets were 10 1/2 games ahead of the Braves. In the end, though, the Braves were 10-9 against the Mets and won the three that mattered most, the last three in Atlanta. The Braves won the division and won themselves a first-round bye; the Mets lost to the Padres in the NL Wild Card Series and went home.

Now it starts up again between them.

The Mets come into the series after their rousing 9-8 comeback win against the Nationals on Thursday night. It looked as if the four games in a row they’d lost after their 7-3 West Coast trip might was about to become five. They’d been ahead, 7-3, going into the eighth. Only the Nationals scored five in the top of the inning, the last of those on a CJ Abrams grand slam off Brooks Raley.

But the Mets came back. They still do that. Pete Alonso tied the game with an RBI double, and Jeff McNeil finally put his team ahead with a triple off the right-field wall before David Robertson pitched a three-up, three-down ninth.

“May not have been sexy,” Buck Showalter said later. “But it was our best and most needed win.”

On the same night, the Braves saw the Marlins rally with five runs in the top of the ninth, stunning Atlanta with what became a 5-4 victory. So, the Marlins finished off the comeback in Atlanta that the Nationals couldn’t quite finish off in New York.

Showalter was concerned -- coming home from last weekend’s series against the Giants in San Francisco and knowing the Braves were coming to town this weekend -- about the Nationals being a trap series for his team. It is exactly what Mets vs. Nationals became. But the Mets did not get swept at the very end, and Thursday night’s game became very much a statement game for them. They’d much rather make a statement -- even with a pitching staff still diminished by injuries -- against the Braves, starting Friday night.

“This was the kind of baseball we’re capable of playing,” McNeil, who stayed hot even through the Mets’ slump, said of his team’s comeback. “Hopefully, it will give us some momentum going into the Braves.”

“There are a lot of winners on this team,” Joey Lucchesi, Thursday night’s Mets starter, said.

Lucchesi, making his second start since coming back from Tommy John surgery, pitched well enough to get a victory after throwing seven shutout innings against the Giants last week. The Mets were ahead, 4-1, when the sixth inning started. But the top of the sixth ended with the Mets’ lead down to one run, and then the night seemed to come crashing down after Abrams’ slam and it looked as if the Mets would lose again.

They didn’t.

Francisco Lindor came out of his slump with three RBIs, and Alonso came out of his with two. Brandon Nimmo scored two more runs and got two more hits, raising his average to .341. McNeil had what turned out to be the game-winner. And one of the Mets’ prized kids, third baseman Brett Baty, had his best game of the season with three hits, including a home run.

“Everybody stepped up tonight,” Baty said.

The Mets stopped hitting when they got back to New York. That changed in a big way Thursday. Even Starling Marte, who has struggled, got a hit -- hit the ball hard -- and scored the tying run in the eighth, when Alonso knocked him home.

On the same night when the Braves didn’t sweep the Marlins, the Mets didn’t get swept by the Nationals. Preliminaries are over. We get the first big Mets-Braves series of the early season now. The Mets beat up on the Braves early last season. The Braves got them late, and they ended up winning the East for the fifth straight time.

So much has changed for the Mets lately. Steve Cohen is the owner, and Buck is the manager. Lindor came to New York, so did Scherzer, now Verlander. But the story with the Braves still hasn’t changed. The ending is always the same. The Mets look to start changing that Friday night. In so many ways, it feels as if the race in the East starts now.