Pete Alonso was at Citi Field on Wednesday packing up belongings for shipment home in his final days before he reaches free agency.

The first baseman stated after the Mets lost Sunday to the Dodgers in Game 6 of the NLCS that he hopes for a return to the only MLB franchise he’s known.

That sentiment was matched Wednesday by the team’s president of baseball operations, David Stearns.

“[Alonso] is a great Met and I hope we have him back,” Stearns said during an end-of-season wrap-up session with reporters. “I think we both understand this is a process and everyone has got their own interests and Pete deserves to go out into the free agent market and see what’s out there and then ultimately make the best choice for him and his family.”

Alonso, 29, will be maybe the premier power threat available on the market this winter. What remains to be seen is if the Mets value him enough to pay him long-term dollars after a season in which he produced a .240/.329/.459 slash line with 34 homers and 88 RBIs while playing all 162 games.

Alonso has 226 homers in six seasons — Aaron Judge is the only MLB player to have hit more during that stretch. Darryl Strawberry is the all-time Mets home run leader with 252.

Alonso only helped his cause in the postseason, producing a 1.003 OPS with four homers.

Included was a ninth-inning blast against the Brewers that helped save the Mets from elimination in the wild-card round.

But Alonso’s importance to the Mets goes beyond the numbers, according to Stearns.

“Who he is as a person is important,” Stearns said. “What he means to this franchise is important. Who he is as a player is also important, what he contributes on the field.”

Even so, it’s clear Stearns won’t just be handing a blank check to Alonso, who last offseason hired Scott Boras as his agent.

“There is no magic formula,” Stearns said. “There is no equation that spits out what all of that is for us. There is judgment involved. There’s evaluating the market involved and then we’ll see how this process goes throughout the offseason.”

But free agency also often pays for past performance and not future results.

Stearns faces the task of trying to determine whether it makes sense to lock in Alonso, who was paid $20.5 million this season in his final year of arbitration eligibility.

“My job and our job is to put teams together that are going to win going forward,” Stearns said. “We’ll continue to evaluate that not only with Pete, but the entirety of the player landscape and entirety of our team and we’ll do our best to put a team together that allows us to compete next year and for years to come.”

Stearns said he spoke with Alonso on Wednesday, but just in passing.

“Pete and I frankly have never talked about his contract face to face,” Stearns said. “I think those conversations are best left with the player’s representative, but he is very invested in our group and was certainly very invested in our team this year and got some enormous hits for us down the stretch.”

Stearns was asked what role emotion might play in deciding on how to proceed with Alonso.

“We’re all emotional and there are emotional parts to me as well,” Stearns said. “We all want to do really well. It’s really difficult to strip away emotion as we do these things — certainly we try to implement processes that keep us honest — but [team owner] Steve [Cohen] grew up a Met, I grew up a Met fan, and that is always going to be a part of us.”