After spending the last several seasons turning Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” into an equally awkward and appropriate eighth-inning singalong at Citi Field, the Mets have taken the song selection process to the masses this year with a nightly mid-game poll on the scoreboard.

And on Tuesday night, Mets fans made a little less nihilistic but no less self-aware choice by selecting Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now” (sorry, “Piano Man” and “Livin’ On A Prayer”) in the middle of a month that is flooding everyone’s minds with memories of the season-defining, no-good, very-bad months that were supposed to be a relic of the before times.

But on Wednesday night, the Mets also reminded everyone that they’ve always just about as good at dramatically climbing out of self-made holes as they are digging them.

Pete Alonso, battling a sinus infection and/or flu-like symptoms, hit a walk-off three-run homer into the rarely reached second deck in left field to cap a series of late-inning comebacks by the Mets and lift them to an 8-7 win over the major league-leading Rays.

“Even though it sucks being sick, it’s always nice to be able to hit homers,” Alonso said, offering his latest quote that should end up on a T-shirt produced by some entrepreneurial type.

Alonso’s blast — which was preceded by game-tying two- and three-run homers in the seventh and ninth innings by rookies Mark Vientos and Francisco Alvarez, respectively — linked the generations and gave the Mets (21-23 overall, including 6-11 this month) a much-needed victory on a night in which a loss would have been demoralizing.

After Tuesday’s 8-5 loss, Justin Verlander straddled the line between offering some candid accountability that was missing in the Wilpon era — “We expect to be better, I expect to be better, I think this entire organization expects to be better” — while also reminding everyone of the recent history of NL pennant winners.

“I don’t want to give all the cliches here, but in the past few years, you’ve seen a lot of teams that struggled out of the gates find it and click and find a way into the World Series,” Verlander said. “You look at the (2019) Nationals, you look at the Phillies last year — there’s teams, they click at the right time and find their mojo and go from there.”

The Mets, of course, have no shortage of examples of mounting their own stirring comebacks (props to Verlander, who was 16 years old during the 1999 playoffs, for the timely mojo reference), which serves as another reminder of the danger of pulling out the pitchforks and the shovels, especially this early in the season.

But the reminders of previous seasons ruined by miserable months — from the Bobby Valentine era being sunk in August 2002 to the Art Howe era basically ending as it began in April 2003 to the June and July swoons that undid fast starts in 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2018 — were beginning to echo despite the Mets no longer making the self-inflicted mistakes that made such disasters almost inevitable.

The Mets replaced two-time Cy Young Award winner Jacob deGrom with two-time Cy Young Award winner Verlander, not with a couple mid-rotation pitchers who they’d insist would add up to one deGrom. And instead of allowing Brandon Nimmo to exit without an offer and replacing him with a far lesser player, a la Jose Reyes following the 2011 season, the Mets paid the market rate for a still-ascending centerfielder and leadoff hitter entering his age-30 season, even if it means they’re paying a corner outfielder a lot of money on the back end of his seven-year deal.

But the results have been agonizingly familiar for the Mets, who have been hitting when they don’t pitch and not pitching when they hit. The Mets entered Wednesday 3-6 this month when scoring three or fewer runs and 2-5 when scoring five or more runs.

Kodai Senga exited in line for a loss Wednesday night after striking out 12 over six innings of one-run ball, but a routine defeat threatened to turn excruciating when the Rays needed just nine pitches against Adam Ottavino to retake the lead on Brandon Lowe’s two-run homer.

A loss would turned up the heat on manager Buck Showalter, a massive upgrade in the dugout on his predecessors who nonetheless would have faced accurate criticism for sending up left-hander Daniel Vogelbach to pinch-hit for Tommy Pham against right-hander Kevin Kelly after Kelly had just faced his third batter in the sixth inning. Rays manager Kevin Cash, the textbook “collaborative manager,” replaced Kelly with Jake Diekman, who struck out Vogelbach on four pitches.

A loss would have also been a bad omen on night in which the Mets’ front office made one of the few pre-trade deadline moves it can make to upgrade the offense by promoting Vientos, who will mostly be limited to designated hitter. It also would have made it fairer to wonder if the Mets’ second-half fade in 2022 — when they won 101 games and led the NL East for 176 days but finished second before being eliminated by the Padres in a wild card series — was a more ominous precursor than most envisioned.

For at least one night, though, those questions were quieted by the timely homers delivered by Vientos and Alvarez, who was sporting Wilmer Flores’ no. 4 when he hit an absolute moonshot off the advertising signage along the second deck. Their round-trippers also served as reminders of Michael Conforto providing an immediate boost as a rookie in 2015, when a hot start almost unwound when the Mets went 38-42 from May through July and were nightly candidates to be no-hit.

“It’s always exciting when you see a young guy coming up wanting to succeed,” Alonso said. “Mark was huge for us. ‘Alvy’ was huge for us.”

After the Rays scored twice in the top of the 10th, Alonso spared the Mets a less painful but still frustrating loss with a walk-off blast that harkened back to 2019, when the Mets were 11 games under .500 in July but finished 86-76 and weren’t eliminated from wild card contention until the final week.

That, of course, was also the summer of Alonso’s record-setting rookie year, when he turned postgame celebrations into shirt-ripping affairs and added an F to the popular LGM hashtag. (Alonso went all-in with the FCC in his postgame interview with SNY last night, you can easily find it on Twitter)

“(In) ’19, we came I think three games shy, but there’s still a lot of baseball left,” said Alonso, who is now much closer to free agency (you should probably sign him, Steve) than his rookie year. “If you look at a few teams in our division last year, if you look at their record — I mean, people counted them out and people thought that we were going to run away with the division. So it’s still very, very young in the season and anything can happen.”

Including, perhaps, the type of comebacks the Mets have authored and seen before.