How did it come to this? How did the entire Mets' season come to depend so much on a young pitcher, Philip Humber, who had never started in the major leagues until last night?

The Mets needed Humber, three months shy of 25 and with five innings in the major leagues, to start against Washington because, well, there was nobody else.

For a few minutes, there was hope. Humber broke the curve of recent pitching abuses by this declining team, throwing a strike on his very first pitch, if you can imagine such a thing. Soon he even laid down a sacrifice bunt better than a lot of the position players have done during this recent nervous breakdown of fundamentals and pitching.

For this past dreadful week, I have been saying that the new mantra of the Mets is ''not enough,'' as in runs. This remained true last night. The Mets pounded out a 6-2 lead, and then the same horrible thing happened to the kid out of Rice University who was being asked to help salvage a season.

Crack. Crack. Crack. Sounding like frozen branches snapping off trees in an ice storm, the Nationals' bats whacked five runs in the fifth and kept on going for a 9-6 victory, leaving the Mets one game up on the Phillies with four to go.

The Mets recently led by 7 games with 17 to go. No team has ever failed to reach the postseason after being so far ahead that close to the end. If the Mets don't make it, this will be seen as an epic collapse, particularly given New York histrionics and high expectations.

It is true that pitching staffs almost always wear down at this time of year, yet in its lust for television money and gate receipts, baseball continues to demand three tiers of postseason play after a 162-game schedule that wrecks arms, ruins careers. But this is something else, a mass breakdown of the pitching staff.

''We're not scared of losing,'' said Billy Wagner, who was pounded in the ninth but insisted his back spasms have subsided.

Wagner added: ''The problem is how bad we're playing. We're not making wise pitch selections, and I'm talking mostly about myself.''

So dependent on three gallant and elderly pitchers -- Pedro Mart?z, Tom Glavine and Orlando Hern?ez -- the Mets are now trying to hold on. In this age of specialists, the Mets' bullpen has come down with a mass case of the dreaded Stanhouse Syndrome -- walks for everybody. And some of the Mets have lost their minds on defense and on the bases. Make no mistake, this is a team effort.

Into this collapse came Humber, out of Carthage, Tex., who since being recalled from the New Orleans farm team had pitched only three innings since Aug. 27, although surely he has worked on the sidelines.

''If it was in my hands, he would have been pitching before this,'' Mart?z volunteered before the game, quickly adding that Humber's lack of action was understandable because the Mets are in a race.

Mart?z has been giving little seminars on the bench, wiggling his wrists and fingers graphically for youngsters like Humber and Mike Pelfrey. He was also a good teammate on that fateful night in Yankee Stadium in 2003 when Manager Grady Little said he needed Petey for another batter or two, and the pennant eventually flew away. He is still a good soldier, but he did not volunteer to pitch last night.

''Never came up,'' Mart?z said, giving the impression that he has pushed himself quite hard enough to grind out 21 innings in recent weeks after right rotator cuff surgery last fall. Hern?ez did stride out of the bullpen to pitch a wobbly seventh inning, testing the ailing foot that had him hobbling in a therapeutic boot in the past week.

El Duque is a gamer. Heck, they are all gamers. Glavine, who will pitch Sunday if the Mets are still in it, is certainly a gamer, although it may be time to graciously send him home to Atlanta to his family and Smoltzie and Chipper for one farewell season.

Nobody was earning his varsity letter last night. This was serious business. No matter how it goes in the next few days, management must ask if it was too dependent on old hands like Mart?z, Glavine and Hern?ez. After last night's fiasco, Wagner -- a throwback ballplayer, always there to answer for himself -- facetiously said he heard the Mets were using Tom Seaver tonight.

In Seaver's prime, that would have been something. But on this pitching staff, nobody is in his prime. Last night, the kid out of Rice was just about what the rest of them have been, which is to say, not enough.


Photos: Philip Humber, a former Mets' firstround draft pick, had pitched only three innings since Aug. 27.(PHOTOGRAPH BY BARTON SILVERMAN/THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. D1);Philip Humber made it through the first three innings unscathed, but then things fell apart. (PHOTOGRAPH BY BARTON SILVERMAN / THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. D2)