This was Aug. 9, 1994, and it is a day that will remain circled, in bright red ink, in both memory and mind’s eye, forever, for one important reason: it was the first major league baseball game I ever covered.

I arrived early to Yankee Stadium, of course: this was, quite literally, the only thing I’d ever wanted to do with my professional life and I was going to seize the day. At the appropriate moment, the writers were ushered into the manager’s office. It was different then: the pregame chat wasn’t a television show, but more a 20-minute chalk talk. Writers settled into chairs. I stood against a wall.

Buck Showalter smiled.

“What do you have today?” he asked.

And for 20 unforgettable minutes it was … well, mesmerizing. It was pure, unfiltered, unadulterated baseball talk — strategy, situations, anything you could think of. The questions offered by the veteran writers were all smart — but the answers were even more so. I was smart enough (or intimidated enough) to keep my mouth shut and simply absorb all of it. It was like attending an abbreviated master class on baseball.

Afterward I asked one writer — it was Sherman, young guy at The Post — “Is it always like that?”

“Around here it is,” he told me. “But don’t look for that anywhere else.”

I have thought about that day often in the nearly four months since Buck Showalter was named manager of the Mets, his second tour of duty in New York City 27 years after his last one expired inside a weepy clubhouse in Seattle. Baseball went on strike three days after that initial encounter, but I spent a good deal of 1995 around the Yankees, and every minute spent inside the manager’s office was another minute when I learned something about baseball that I’d never known before — usually, something I’d never even thought of before.

It is one reason this Mets season — which kicks off, weather permitting, inside Nationals Park in Washington late Thursday afternoon — promises to be such a fascinating daily experience. Look, the Mets are an expensive outfit, and a veteran one. You aren’t going to find a lot of cuddly baseball tales in the clubhouse. Most of the players have been around the block a time or three.

But you are going to see a different kind of ball.

Now, that will not manifest itself in an obvious way. Showalter is not Billy Martin, or Earl Weaver. You will not know he’s in the room because he kicks dirt on an umpire, works over a water cooler or a postgame cold-cut spread, or goes after his players and his owner in the newspaper. It’s more subtle than that.

And it ought to be exactly what the Mets need.

It ought to be, to put it more precisely, exactly what the Mets have craved.

“Sometimes,” Showalter said on the day he was hired, “learning to win is part of player development.”

And also a part of a team’s development. The Mets these last few years have been a team begging for leadership, begging for gravitas. By the end, they had mostly tuned out Terry Collins. Mickey Callaway was a fiasco, a bizarre choice to be a field manager even before his off-field issues were alleged. And while Luis Rojas is a smart baseball man who will almost certainly be a successful manager someday, it was the wrong team and the wrong time for him. The Mets, too often, have seemed like a team looking for reasons not to lose. And that’s a hard path to success in this game.

Showalter’s presence doesn’t guarantee a championship. It is a well-trod part of his baseball résumé that Showalter has never made it to the World Series. The book on him? He’ll bring you to the doorstep. But then someone else has to open the door: Joe Torre, or Bob Brenly, or Ron Washington. It is a part of his record and Showalter does not shy away from it.

“You want to be the last team standing, and not just once,” he said. “It’s not something that’s going to define my life, but it is something that wakes me up every day now.”

If you are the Mets, though, you will look at how Showalter’s track record also included huge immediate improvements at all four of his stops — the Yankees, the Diamondbacks, the Rangers and the Orioles — and you will start there, for this is also a part of his permanent record:

In the space of two years, the Yankees went from 71 wins to 88 under Showalter. In the space of two years, the Diamondbacks went from zero wins to 100. In the space of two years, the Rangers went from 72 wins to 89. In the space of two years, the Orioles went from 66 wins to 93.

That doesn’t happen by accident. It doesn’t happen by whim. This is what Showalter does and the Mets have been yearning for it. Get them to the doorstep? Showalter can do that.

And one of those years — especially if he has Max Scherzer and Jacob deGrom to throw in a short series — maybe he finally gets to bust the door down, too, like Danny Reagan on “Blue Bloods.”

“You can’t guarantee a lot in this game, but I know we’re going to be prepared and I know we aren’t going to be scared. It’s a good scouting report on us.”

That was a quote in faded blue pen from an old notebook of mine, dated Aug. 9, 1994. But it could certainly have been said by the same man, in a similar circumstance, on April 7, 2022. Now, as then, a New York team is looking to shake off some losing cobwebs and get back to the business of winning baseball games. Now, as then, this is truth: you’d rather have Buck Showalter in your dugout than the other guy’s.