Remembering Johan Santana’s no-hitter a year later

It’s been over a year since that unforgettable June day. Ask any Mets fan where they were on June 1^st, 2012 and they can tell you. It is a moment that will go down in history: Johan Santana threw the first Mets no-hitter. Now, a year later, what impact does that no-hitter still have?

For the casual fan, it is a moment they will tell their kids and grandkids. It is a day that fans can remember vividly. For the diehard fan, it’s a sigh of relief. Finally the Mets have gotten a no hitter and are off the dreaded list of teams that don’t have one. It was taken as a symbol of progress.

The Mets haven’t been very good since their NLCS run back in 2006, so good moments are hard to come by. This is one of those bright spots during the dark times. Fans viewed this as the beginning of the sun being shinned on this franchise and that the good fortunes were just around the corner.

A simple event like a no-hitter changed the franchise for one night. That night, it wasn’t about the failures or what the future looked like. It was just about witnessing history. Fans stopped thinking about what had happened over the past four or five years or all the talk about “the future” and what Sandy Alderson was working on.

For a fan base that has been through so much, this simple event gave fans something to celebrate. On that one night, all the analysts, reporters, commentators, writers and beat reporters dropped those roles and just became fans that night. When history unfolds right before your eyes, nothing else matters than watching it happen.

Everyone stopped caring about “who’s getting traded where” or “who’s getting called up” and it just became about watching one man take on a huge amount of pressure and giving a fan base a pitching performance for the ages.

This past weekend, SNY and the Mets re-aired the Santana no hitter. It was very cool to see the social media response to all of this, as fans were tweeting just as if they were watching the game the first time and sharing memories of just one-year ago.

For fans of teams like the Mets, successes have been hard to find lately (or at all). But this is one of those events that can make every fan forget about the gripes they have with a certain player or owner or team and just realize that they are watching an instant classic.

A year later, it’s still a moment that I as a fan can remember vividly. That is true for most of the diehards who watch this team on a daily basis. While this no-hitter was great for a fan base needing a restart, no feeling will be better than remembering where we all were when the Mets win that next World Series ring.