The Great Liz Smith, Big Blue’s lost season & Happy 90th, Mom!. . .

We lost one of the great ones last week when we lost

I loved reading her, loved working with her, loved knowing her.

She didn’t just honor this business with her talent, and her reporting, and her contacts.

She honored it because of all the fun she had, the kind of fun that made all of us want to do this sort of work in the first place. We are going to find out on Sunday, at MetLife Stadium, if it would be less cruel for and Steve Tisch to fire now. By the way? There is never any form chart in matters like this, and lost seasons like this.

No one cares at this point how the Giants have always done things.

Because the way the Giants have always done things has now produced this team, and this 1-8 season.

Who knows, maybe they can shock the world on Sunday against the Chiefs.

But Giant s fans are smar t enough to know that when you watch the season they’re watching, the record isn’t as much about a lack of effort as a lack of talent. As much as was viewed as a basketball savior at the Garden when the Knicks won the lottery and got to draft him first, the crowd at the Garden never loved him as much when he was a kid as they love the kid,

Next time against LeBron and the Cavs, maybe the Knicks can win the staredown and also win the game. Those three UCLA basketball players didn’t just do dumb, entitled young-guy stuff in China, they did criminal stuff.

They did it in a foreign country that has absolutely no sense of humor when you break the law, wherever you came from to do it.

So they got off easy.

But as much as the world wants to throw the book at them now, I’m still not sure they’d be getting off easy if they still got to play basketball this season.

At a time when there are far more important concerns on college campuses in America, as we keep seeing fraternity kids die because of the stupidity of fraternity codes about excess drinking, I’m not sure that we have to treat what and and

a matter of life and death.

I still don’t see why the governments of both countries didn’t take my suggestion, before

intervened: A prisoner swap. We send LiAngelo’s father to China, we get him and his two teammates back.

Win, win. a season that will always be remembered at Yankee Stadium.

All Rise Judge was part of a rising at Yankee Stadium the likes of which we haven’t seen since Derek Jeter was a Yankee and the ’96 Yankees won it all.

But the voters got it right: He wasn’t the MVP of the American League.

not only deserved to win, he deserved to win in a runaway.

I know the analytics guys can probably out-debate me on this, but I believe that right now, the Astros second baseman is the best player in baseball. Best player, best team. Sometimes it still works out that way in sports. I write this every year, and am writing it again this week, and will keep writing it until

is in the Hall of Fame. Nine years after he retired, it is more clear than ever how worthy he is of Cooperstown, starting with the 270-153 record compiled over 18 elegant seasons in the meat grinder of the American League East, so much of his prime spent in the thick of the steroids era.

Oh, and by the way, pitching as much as he did at Camden Yards and Fenway and Yankee Stadium. Say it again: Mussina wasn’t just one of the great pitchers of his time, he is one of the great pitchers of all time. Finally today: Happy Birthday to my mom, who turned 90 on Friday.

I asked her if it was all right to put that number in the newspaper.

She said that I should go ahead, she was proud of her age, tell everybody. So I am. She ought to be proud. She worked hard to get here, never harder than she has over the past year.

A champion of our family, happy as ever to have my Pops on the other side of the room.