Since we are so relentlessly advised that first impressions are so important, we ought to be compelled to list one every now and then, so I guess my first impression of baseball's postseason is that apparently Johan Santana is just not going to be intimidated by Jason Kendall.

You know, despite Kendall's one home run this year.

Geez Jason, guys in the big leagues hit two home runs accidentally.

Thus the richly promising baseball playoffs started yesterday with Santana, the game's reigning virtuoso of the mound, dismissing Kendall on three pitches as the A's-Twins series brought October to life under a blue-gray Minneapolis ceiling.

The Twins are better equipped for this five-game smackdown, as are the Yankees in their American League Division Series appointment with the fading Tigers. There's an old baseball adage that goes something like, when you've got a $27 million-a-year player with 35 homers and 121 RBIs hitting sixth in your postseason lineup, even if it's Alex Rodriguez, and your projected postseason rotation has more wins (62) than any other team, you're in pretty good shape. Yeah, I think that's it. And there are pockets of sentiment from one end of this keyboard to the other that the generally flightless Cardinals are going to right themselves just in time to outlive the Padres into next week.

But the division series with the tastiest story lines, tastiness being strictly a matter of, you know, taste, is the Mets-Dodgers argument that begins this afternoon near LaGuardia Airport.

Here's a matchup with historical texture and hysterical happenstance well beyond the mere trivia that the catcher for the Mets is the former catcher for the Dodgers who had to leave Hollywood to marry a Playboy model and get himself into the tabloid sleazefest over allegations from his wife and a Long Island teenager regarding his, uh, appetites.

For purposes of our discussion, alas, Paul Lo Duca is potentially a championship-caliber backstop handling a severely depleted New York rotation that happens to be facing the hottest team in either league, your Los Angeles Dodgers, winners of 41 of their past 60 games.

"When you look at the way we've played the last two months of the season, and especially the last week, I think that's very encouraging not only for us but for the City of Los Angeles," Dodgers pitcher Derek Lowe was blogging yesterday. "You know we didn't back in. We didn't get into the playoffs because some team lost a bunch of games and let us in. We earned this. We won [the last] seven games in a row.

"Fans should expect a lot of this team, because the players expect a lot out of this team. This isn't a situation where we made it this year and that's the accomplishment and whatever happens happens. That's not the way we feel."

The Dodgers might feel as if they are destined for a full October, but there are immediate obstacles that are compellingly formidable, among them Carlos Delgado, the magnificent Mets' masher who has waited 1,710 games, longer than anyone without postseason experience, for today to dawn. With Carlos Beltran and David Wright, Delgado completes a heart of the order that accounted for 105 homers and 346 RBIs, the most fearsome mid-lineup thicket this side of that side of New York.

The series further features two of the game's top leadoff hitters, overpriced shortstop Rafael Furcal of the Dodgers, who hit 15 homers and drove in 63 runs, and underpriced shortstop Jose Reyes of the Mets, who hit 19 homers, drove in 81 runs and, with 64 steals, came within five thefts of having stole more bases than the entire Pirates roster.

Just as intriguing, however, is this newest Mets-Dodgers milepost in the game's storied history, a reminder of the inevitability of change and its sometimes incredible acceleration. It was the Dodgers' exit from New York in 1957 that created the National League vacuum that begat the Mets five years later. Most of half a century will bring you metric tons of change, but there have been equally dramatic changes in the very nature of the sport just since these teams last met in the postseason, 1988.

In that year, Game 1 of the National League Championship Series matched Orel Hershiser against the Mets' Dwight Gooden, who had won 18 games that year and pitched 10 complete games. Here, 18 seasons later, no National League team pitched 10 complete games. (The Cleveland Indians pitched 13, but what did that get them?)

One year ago, Pirates manager Jim Tracy was still nominally the Dodgers' manager. Eleven months ago, Dodgers general manager Ned Colletti was still the assistant general manager of the San Francisco Giants. Heck, 10 weeks ago, the Dodgers were 47-55.

"I can't say there weren't a few days I wondered when we'd pull out of it," Colletti was telling MLB.com the other day. "What we saw was how badly they wanted to be great."

The Dodgers will be great, at least for a week. They'll win in five.