In the summer of 2001, a month or two before everything changed, Robin Ventura played golf with a man named Chris Quackenbush. Soon after, Quackenbush came to a game to see his friend, Bobby Valentine, the New York Mets’ manager. Ventura recognized him during batting practice and said hello.That was that, or it would have been, if not for what happened. And when it did, Ventura remembered the conversation and how it made him feel — not as a veteran ballplayer, but as a young father. He will never forget.“His son kept looking at him,” Ventura said by phone last week, “and he had this look of admiration towards his dad, like, ‘This is so great.’ He just couldn’t believe he was down on the field. And I’d had my son probably three years before and I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, it would be so great to —’ I don’t know. You kind of want your kids to look at you like that.“And when it happened, and he was there and didn’t make it, it just — I do go back and look when I go down there and go to the pools, and I find his name. And I don’t know why, but I just remember that moment of thinking of his son, what he’s going to miss, and what Chris is going to miss. It’s a tough thing. You’re going back to how insignificant you are at that moment.“Those are the things that stick with you, that baseball, yeah, it could be kind of a good thing to come back and play, get people to cheer, laugh maybe, something like that. But in the end, you don’t know how much it helped or didn’t help. You feel a little overwhelmed by all of it.”Ventura is 59 years old now. His hair is gray, his children are grown. He helps coach the baseball team at Oklahoma State, his alma mater. It’s been a decade since he managed the Chicago White Sox, more than two since he last played in the majors. His Mets career was over by the end of 2001, with a trade across town to the Yankees.Yet there was Ventura in Manhattan this week, with his old Mets teammates, on another brilliant Tuesday morning in the sweet spot between summer heat and autumn chill. For all of the franchise’s misadventures, the Mets — led by ones who were there for that sad September — get this right.They meet annually at a firehouse, this time Ladder 25/Division 3/Collapse Rescue 1 on West 77th St. A mural at the bottom of the stairs honors seven members who answered a call from there and never returned. The players are not the stars of this reunion.“It was the greatest rescue in the history of the fire department,” said Capt. Daniel Donleavy. “People will talk about everyone that died. What about the people that we saved, with the police officers? Telling people to run, move, get out of the building?”The Mets were in Pittsburgh when it happened, a veteran team with a losing record, finally mounting a late charge. They would come together in more meaningful ways, finding a shared purpose in their anger, fear and grief. John Franco calls that team “a band of brothers” now, and he showed up on Tuesday, too, with Al Leiter, Todd Zeile and David Wright.