PITTSBURGH — The Andy Warhol Museum will never be confused for a sports bar, though you suspect Warhol himself would have been delighted at the absurdity of the patrons stealing glances at their cell phones in between studying his paintings of Campbell’s Soup, Coke bottles and Marilyn Monroe.

“It’s 13-13!” came an amplified whisper at one point.

“It’s 16-16!”

On the other side of the pond, the match on Friday afternoon between South African Kevin Anderson and John Isner reached 20-20, yet here, in the seven-story building on Sandusky Street, a pack of rapt art lovers had moved on from the silk screens and the blotted-line drawings and the faux boxes of Brillo pads to gather around the live feed of a tennis match.

“Will they play forever?” someone asked.

“It’s the fifth set at Wimbledon,” someone helpfully replied. “They play till it’s over. No tiebreakers.”
When Anderson finally outlasted Isner, there was a gasp of happiness — as much for the resolution as for the outcome — and then the people returned to their day at the museum, on a day when most of them normally would have been blissfully unaware of the Gentleman’s Semifinal match at the All England Club.

But there are certain things that capture your imagination in sports, even if sports is rarely part of that imagination. And when a match or a game goes beyond the standard structure and stricture of time, that is always one of those times.

And “Will they play forever?” is really a classic sporting question.

Which is why, every four years, it becomes a point of debate about how World Cup knockout games are decided. Admittedly, that is a subject that mostly flummoxes the folks who only really pay attention on a quadrennial basis, because most followers of football have long ago made their peace with the penalty-kick format that decides games after the 90 minutes of regulation, the 30 minutes of extra time and the mystical, arbitrary amount of stoppage time (which even ardent soccer aficionados generally concede is a little odd).

Even most of us who still think that deciding a World Cup match on kicks is the equivalent of deciding Game 7 of the World Series via home run derby or the NCAA basketball tournament with a game of H-O-R-S-E have a hard time countering the argument of a friend of mine, a soccer player much of his life, who told me, “Of course you want them to play all day. Because you’re not the one out there who would be playing all day.”

And the truth is, that was one of the things about the Friday Wimbledon match. By the time Isner and Anderson shook hands at the end of Anderson’s epic 6-hour, 35-minute, 7-6 (8-6), 6-7 (5-7), 6-7 (9-11), 6-4, 26-24 victory, Isner looked like he’d just finished back-to-back triathlons. And even Anderson, the victor, who looked remarkably fresh at the end, essentially called for the end of the marathon method for determining a fifth set at Wimbledon, the last place of consequence where this is still the rule.

“I think it’s long overdue,” Anderson said of switching to some kind of tiebreaker format. “We’re out there playing for seven hours. It’s tough. I’m a proponent of changing that rule, for sure.”

Of course, the irony is that what may be the best-possible solution for the quandary of forcing exhausted players to play overtime was put on display right after that epic match at the All England Club — though there’s no way it would ever have a prayer of being implemented for a variety of reasons.

Because the Rafael Nadal-Novak Djokovic match that followed offered what would be a perfect, if un-implementable blueprint. The two players played three intense sets after Anderson-Isner ended — then had to put off the ending due to curfew.

So even though the fifth set of that match was also a near-epic marathon — Djokovic finally winning 10-8 in the fifth — both players looked absolutely at the top of their game even at the end. Part of that is that both are in extraordinary shape. But it didn’t hurt that they had a night to sleep on things, either.

We’re never going to live in a world where putting off a World Cup overtime until the next day is going to be feasible, so four years from now we’ll learn to adjust all over again. And by then, Wimbledon’s fifth-set tradition will probably be a distant memory, too.

Only he knows if he’d truly wants the job and if he’d want to work for the folks who would be his bosses. But if Joe Girardi is still available when the Mets realize they need to move on from Mickey Callaway, that’s a deal that has to get done.

I notice ex-coach Ben McAdoo didn’t get around to the No. 1 upgrade the Giants have made that might allow them to be better at this point this year than they were at this point last year…

“NYPD Blue” is now available on Amazon Prime, which means if there’s a rainy day looming you now have more than another material to fill every waking hour.

Whose number do you think they retire first over at Barclays Center, Dwight Howard’s or Jeremy Lin’s?

Richard Siegelman: Will Chris Majkowski’s 4,011 (and counting) consecutive games streak knock Cal Ripken’s 2,632 out of the MLB record book the way Cal once knocked Lou Gehrig’s 2,130 out ?

Vac: Given some of the baseball Maj has had to watch in that stretch, some of those games ought to count double. Or triple.

Kenneth Meltsner: The Mets signed the worst free-agent pitcher, middle-reliever, third-baseman and right-fielder. In the words of Max Bialystock, “Where did they go right?”

Vac: This season really has had a “Producers”-like feel right from the start, hasn’t it?

@jmpdds: Is it wrong to assume, that if Bernie Madoff had never been born, the Wilpons would never had the money to buy my beloved Mets? Bobby Bonilla sends a thank you to Bernie every year.

@MikeVacc: Not only is it not wrong, it’s good to remember this every once in a while as you see them add chapter after chapter of bad stewardship to their legacy.

Alan Hirschberg: The sad part of being a Mets fan right now is knowing that their next meaningful game will be opening day, 2019. The sadder part is knowing that their next meaningful game after that will be opening day, 2020.

Vac: What can I tell you? Sometimes train wrecks bring out everyone’s A game.