This story was excerpted from Anthony DiComo’s Mets Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

I’m always fascinated by how careers end. In 2021, I sat in the press box watching Matt Harvey pitch as a visitor in Citi Field for the first and last time in his career. That day, fans offered Harvey multiple standing ovations.

No longer the "Dark Knight" or the bringer of "Harvey Days." He was just another pitcher.

Later, Harvey stared into a laptop camera for a Zoom interview and appeared genuinely humbled, if not outright apologetic. Here was a pitcher who had played nine seasons in the big leagues, six of them in New York. A pitcher who had rocketed to a type of fame that few baseball players experience -- a Dwight Gooden-sort of fireball, a Keith Hernandez-style throwback, a 20-something celebrity who partied with hockey players and dated models, who once skipped a postseason workout, posed nude in a magazine and cursed me out for seeking an interview.

“Between the injuries and I think me getting in my own way and causing some of those problems, I feel for the fans that maybe I let them down,” Harvey said after that final start in Queens. “I guess it’s fair to say that I would understand if they [booed].”

Harvey did not know that he would retire less than two years later, following stints in the Minor Leagues and at the World Baseball Classic, but it was obvious that his career was drawing to a close. And while it’s easy to consider "What could have been?" in such moments, perhaps it’s more comforting to revel in "What was." For Mets fans, Harvey was a savior, a baseball supernova, the devil on your shoulder that you didn’t quite mind being there.

More than anything, he was fun to watch. The “Harvey’s better” game. The perfect-game bid against the White Sox. The "bloody nose" game. World Series Game 5. This was baseball as it ought to be, a marquee attraction built around a larger-than-life starting pitcher. I remember feeling agitated when my off-days fell during his starts, because there was such a real chance of missing something extraordinary.

In the end, Harvey retired a relatively unaccomplished pitcher. He finished with 50 wins and 66 losses. He ranks 722nd in Major League history in strikeouts, sandwiched between names like Pink Hawley and Rodrigo López. His ERA+ was 91, suggesting the career of a slightly below-average starter.

That is how to lie with statistics. Harvey was not average. Nothing about him was average. He was flawed, overconfident, arrogant and haunted, but he was also, for a brief time, a matinee idol. He was the type of player who turns fans into fanatics, who carves out a place in franchise canon with a sort of “Remember where you were ...” nostalgia.

There is an image that sticks with me of Harvey, from the 2013 Sports Illustrated article that gifted him his nickname “The Dark Knight of Gotham.” There is Harvey, standing in full uniform in Queensbridge Park, baseball in hand and the familiar ugliness of the 59th Street Bridge splayed out behind him. There is something majestic about Harvey in that photograph, or perhaps, it’s the sort of majesty that surfaces only in hindsight: the knowledge that the cheerful blue sky above him would soon turn gray.

Harvey should have been better, could have been better and could have given the Mets and himself so much more. He’s also well worth appreciating for exactly what he was.