THE Mets’ consolation is that there wasn’t going to be any champagne, anyway – not to celebrate any wild-card berth while the division title was still at stake. This edict, handed down by Steve Phillips, was supported by not only the Women’s’ Christian Temperance Union, but baseball purists everywhere.

Second place was, after all, second place until baseball, following the lead of football, basketball and hockey, contrived being a bridesmaid into big bucks. With the Mets entering last night only able to lose one game of their last six (and it would have had to be against Montreal on the weekend), to win the National League East, it was a shot even longer than any Chipper Jones has ever hit against them.

So, Phillips, the last bastion of the sanctity of being one of three division champions in a four-team field can turn out the lights after the Braves closed the door with last night’s 7-1 victory. If both the Diamondbacks and Dodgers failed to survive the night, the Mets can celebrate a playoff berth when they report to Shea today with the “tea and crumpets” Phillips jokingly suggested. Or, should it still mathematically matter, when they beat the Braves, they can unapologetically break out the happy juice.

If those scrubbing bubbles wash away the sins of the left side of the Mets’ infield, which three times last night failed to hit targets a lot less moving than the value of a division championship, then all the better. “What I’m looking for the last few games is just for us just to play better, sound baseball,” said Jay Payton. And if it comes in the next two games to narrow the Braves gap in the season series, any advantage going into an NLCS, provided both teams get there, shouldn’t be exaggerated.

“It’s a little upsetting because we are a team that I think we match up well against,” said Al Leiter. “We would like to get the season series to at least OK.”

If not, then that’s OK, because whatever room the Braves occupy in the Mets minds could be quickly evacuated with a few well-pitched games. Not only do they put on their pants one leg at a time, but last night they were caught drinking Andre so the Mets should not feel obligated to brown-bagging Cold Duck. They will be in the playoffs, and no less legitimately than when their 97-win team beat Arizona’s 100-win juggernaut a year ago, or when Leiter’s 92-win Florida team won the 1997 World Series. Or when the 1997 Yankees, a 96-victory wild-card team, went down to 86-win division winner Cleveland.

If you are good enough to break 90 wins, as the Mets will do, as every wild-card team has done since 1996 (we’re leaving out 1995, the first wild-card year, when the season was shortened to 144 games by the strike), then they are good enough to go to the World Series. The imported stuff they drink after the World Series has a way of making a team and its fans forget they are celebrating what was a second-place team.

Bobby Valentine, insisting Mike Piazza get his rest, obviously never put the highest priority on dethroning the Braves, and the Mets followed the manager’s lead. Thanks more to the wild-card format than the Mets’ September struggles, the drama in this series was killed before the Braves came to town.

For the advantage of one home game in two rounds, anything that compromised the Mets’ freshness for the true competition to come, was not worth the extra effort.

They didn’t need home-field advantage to beat Arizona a year ago, won’t need it over the Braves when they meet again for real if their pitching matches up as well as it should.

“Four teams make it and anything can happen,” said Leiter. “We proved that last year when most experts thought we would lose to the Diamondbacks because of Randy Johnson and we wound up winning in four.

“The wild card is no booby prize. If there was no wild card, a year ago there was no Todd Pratt home run, no Robin Ventura grand slam single. ”

Since the creation of the wild card, there hasn’t been a second-place team that didn’t have a record as good as at least one division champion. This year, especially, there seems no particular opponent advantage to winning the East, not when St. Louis seems barely less dangerous than San Francisco.

The Mets haven’t proved they can beat the Braves, but they are still a series away from seeing them again, provided of course, Atlanta gets that far, too.

Remarkably, Atlanta has come through the best-of-five against some teams that could match them better for starting pitching in a short series than a long one, five consecutive times, but that’s no guarantee that they will do it the sixth, or that their mastery of a good Mets team at Turner Field is forever, or that two weeks from now, the champagne the Braves spilled in the visitors locker room last night won’t be just another sticky mess.