The Plaza Hotel's 100th anniversary last night ought to have been a joyous celebration. The Orchestra of St. Luke's played a forties-Hollywood soundtrack. Yitzhak Tshuva, the Israeli mogul who turned the hotel into condos, smiled and laughed among some 200 family members and his favorite singer, Paul Anka. Gucci brought really cool fireworks — they even shot rockets off the roof of the building — and a twelve-foot, one-ton Ron Ben-Israel cake in the building's image was admired and then eaten. And it was good. And yet, Matthew Broderick, there to toast the happy occasion, could barely contain his sorrow.

"Let's go Mets," he said weakly at the start of his speech, then paused. "I'm over it." But he wasn't. Sunday had not been good, he said. "I was pretty miserable," he sighed. "The whole week was bad. This was a very painful season." He paused again. "Just the worst. You try to convince yourself that it doesn't matter, that these people are crazy for being so hurt by it all. But I am, too."

He'd coped, he said, by imposing a total media blackout. "I don't look at it in the papers," he said. "I can't read the articles." He couldn't even make it through the game. "I had to leave by the third or fourth inning. I don't think in the first inning the Mets have ever been down 7-1. I mean, it was just awful." He went to see Transformers with his son, but even the sight of giant robots attacking one another failed to cheer him. Only one thing gave him solace: "It'll never happen again," he sighed. "I guess that's a good thing." Still, it was clear that the wounds were deep. He looked up at building, fireworks shooting out of every window, applauded, and sighed. "Now it's going to burn down." —Jada Yuan