October baseball returns to Citi Field late Tuesday afternoon, when what has been a rousing Mets-Phillies matchup after two games arrives in Queens for Game 3 of the National League Division Series. There hasn’t been a lot of postseason baseball at Citi Field since the place opened in April of 2009. But this game, between these two teams, is going to feel like a lot on Tuesday. And it will sound like more, as a New York baseball crowd will try its best to outshout the one both teams just heard in Philly.

• NLDS Game 3, presented by Booking.com: Tuesday, 5 p.m. ET on FS1

In the history of the newer ballpark near where old Shea Stadium once stood, there have been just three seasons when the Mets put some October in it, a total of 11 postseason games, five the Mets won and six they lost. The place got its big run, of course, in 2015, when the Mets made their run to the World Series, before losing to the Royals in five games. Matt Harvey won two October games that year, and so did Noah Syndergaard, and it looked like Harvey was going to win another in Game 5 to send the thing back to Kansas City, before Harvey stayed in the game too long and the Mets finally lost in 12 innings, finishing their season.

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The next year, the Mets played the 2016 NL Wild Card Game against the Giants. Syndergaard went toe-to-toe with the great Madison Bumgarner for seven shutout innings. But Bumgarner went the distance, Conor Gillaspie hit a three-run homer in the ninth inning off Jeurys Familia, and the Mets went home -- the same way they did in 2022, despite having won 101 regular-season games, after losing Game 3 of their Wild Card Series to the Padres.

Now the Mets are back home amid the first playoff series the Mets and Phillies have ever played, after everything we just saw at Citizens Bank Park, which really did feel like a lot. The Mets survived a brilliant start from former Met Zack Wheeler on Saturday, came back in the late innings again -- the way they had twice before last week -- and got Game 1 off the Phillies bullpen.

Then we got Game 2, which felt like a novel when it was over. Mark Vientos hit another homer for the Mets and so did Pete Alonso, and Edwin Diaz seemed to have gotten himself a seventh-inning save for his team -- until things went wrong for him in the eighth the way they had in Atlanta last Monday afternoon. Still, though, the Mets came back, the way they have been coming back since the end of May. Vientos, who has been such a crucial figure in everything good that has happened to the Mets since they were 22-33 right before June 1, hit a second home run to tie this game at 6.

Only this time, it was the Phillies who came back. Bryce Harper and Nick Castellanos had gotten the Phillies into the game with back-to-back home runs off Luis Severino when the Phillies were down, 3-0, and it looked and felt to all the world as if they were playing for their season.

In the bottom of the ninth, because maybe this just had to be a bottom-of-the-ninth game, the Phillies had one more comeback in them on the day when they needed to even this series before it did come back to New York. Trea Turner walked and Harper nearly brought him home with a searing line drive that just went foul in the right-field corner. Harper walked and then Castellanos ripped a ball into the left-field corner, and the Division Series between two old rivals, feeling very fresh, was tied at one game apiece.

“I said to the guys, 'Rocky would be proud,'” Harper said when it was over. “Never-say-die mentality. Just a great game.”

But the Mets, after everything they’ve done over the past four months and now just after the last week -- the game they had to get from the Braves that officially put them in the postseason, and then the three-run homer Alonso hit in the ninth inning in Milwaukee on Thursday night to get them to Philadelphia -- have to feel as if they’ve got a bit of Rocky in them, too.

“It’s been hard, but here we are,” Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said Sunday. “I’m looking forward to getting back to Citi Field.”

Not a lot of postseason history in the place, not like the Mets had when Shea Stadium was still standing on the other side of the parking lot. Just those 11 games, across three Octobers. Now two more games roll into Queens starting Tuesday, a little after 5 p.m. ET.

A couple weeks ago, the Mets took three of four games from the Phillies at Citi Field when they were still grinding their way toward a Wild Card spot. Brandon Nimmo, who hit a home run in Game 2 on Sunday, hit one off Wheeler in the series finale, and the Mets won that game, 2-1.

“This was playoff baseball, this was a playoff atmosphere,” Nimmo said that night.

Tuesday is the real thing. We get Game 3 between the Mets and Phillies after the two games we just saw. In a series where both teams now believe that, well, they gotta believe.