It’s getting to that point of the baseball calendar where it is still early enough to remind yourself, and all of your panicky friends, that it is a long season, that there are still 130 games left, that one month is no time to start building basement shelters for protection from the falling sky.

But it’s also deep enough to acknowledge some troubling realities.

And the Mets, on the fifth of May, will wake up with a hangover of troubling realities.

“It hasn’t quite matched up yet,” Justin Verlander said inside the visitor’s clubhouse at Detroit’s Comerica Park Thursday afternoon. “We’ve done everything well at certain points in time but we haven’t been pitching well night in and night out or hitting well night in and night out.”

Verlander was the man of the moment, appearing for the first time as a Met at the ballpark where he’d gained his first burst of stardom, against a team for whom he won Rookie of the Year, one of his three Cy Youngs and an MVP. And he was perfectly fine across 80 pitches in which he touched 97 mph once and sat mostly at 95 — five innings, two runs, five hits, five strikeouts.

But when he allowed two home runs in the space of three pitches in the bottom of the first — off a curveball to Riley Greene and a fastball to old friend Javy Baez — there was little reason to keep up with the game. The Mets’ bats were muffled again, the sixth time in 32 games they’ve been shut out, Eduardo Rodriguez manhandling them across eight innings.

Verlander settled down after that early dusting, and one takeaway should be that he’ll be at or near where the Mets expected him to be from here.

But there is another takeaway, too:

The Mets are scuffling. They are taking a slew of terrible at-bats, and heading into Thursday they’d suffered from the worst starting pitching through 31 games since … the ’62 Mets. It’s kind of a bad thing when you can’t hit and you can’t pitch, and there isn’t a single favorable thing that can happen when you start measuring yourself up against the ’62 Mets.

Look, they are 16-16. They have a gaggle of games ahead against terrible teams (although the Tigers were supposed to be included in that welcoming group and all they did was sweep the Mets clear out of Motown). The Mets don’t have to go very far to find reminders of just how long the season can be; all they need is to look at their own division.

The Phillies were 21-29 on the morning of June 1 last year; on the evening of Nov. 1 they took a 2-1 lead in the World Series with a 7-0 wipeout of the Astros in front of a delirious home crowd. On Aug. 1, 2021, the Braves were 52-55 and had already lost their best player, Ronald Acuña Jr., to a busted knee; 94 days later they crushed the Astros, 7-0, to win the World Series. And on May 22, 2019, the Nats were 19-31, then won 86 of the next 129 games they played, the last of those a 6-2 win in Houston in Game 7 of the World Series.

So, yes: Cinco de Mayo is a little early to be clanging alarm bells.

But you can certainly ring them. You can certainly wonder if the 2022 version of the Mets was an ideal that the ’23 edition will be hard-pressed to emulate. Thirty-two games is a smallish sample size but it represents a month, not a week. There are issues that need to be addressed and problems that need to be solved. Plenty of time for both to happen.

It just has to happen. Or else things may start to get a little uncomfortable at Citi Field, where the locals are never shy about audibly expressing their discomfort.

“It’s not good,” Brandon Nimmo said. “But teams have been in this position before.”

Nimmo has obviously brushed up on recent NL East history, even if he was remarkably unaware of just how awful a decision it was to try and swipe a base with one out in the ninth, the Mets down 2-0, Starling Marte up, Francisco Lindor on deck and Pete Alonso in the hole. Maybe being in Detroit he was inspired by the ghost of Ty Cobb, but he was thrown out by 3 feet and the Mets expired a few seconds later.

“There is probably not a good chance of [me doing] that in the near future,” he sheepishly conceded.

But it’s just one of a growing pile of bricks the Mets have assembled so far this year, specifically in this 2-9 stretch that has sunk a promising 14-7 start back to sea level just two weeks later. Still early? Sure. That’s the baseball adage to cling to. But here’s one that’ll be in the back of everyone’s mind soon enough if things don’t change: It gets late early out there.