NEW YORK - A couple hours before gametime, New York Rangers coach Tom Renney met the media at Madison Square Garden. The first question: What was his take on Joe Torre and the Yankees?

Shots of George Steinbrenner, Derek Jeter and Jason Giambi splashed on the back pages of the tabloids Tuesday. Ranting about the Yankees dominated the airwaves on WFAN radio and a sports announcer on WCBS-AM began his report by playfully apologizing that he would get to the Mets. Sometime later.

Oh, yeah. The Mets. They're the local baseball team that's still playing.

No Subway Series this year. Hardly matters, at least not in this town, where talk invariably seems to tilt toward the guys in the Bronx.

The Mets know it. Kind of obsess about their Subway Shadow, too, as if the Yankees plot to steal coverage from them.

A day after his club swept the Dodgers in the first round of the playoffs, Mets chief operating officer Jeff Wilpon was acutely aware the Yankees might keep attracting interest, despite getting knocked out by Detroit.

Probably more than his club. Maybe for a while.

“We have our own focus and we're worried about ourselves,” he said Sunday. “We're not worried about them.”

As for a rivalry, “If the Mets fans feel it's good, then I guess it's good,” he said.

The same thing occurs in other two-team markets. At last year's World Series, much of Chicago was concentrating on how the Cubs could get better, rather than whether the White Sox would win their first championship since 1917.

And in the Bay Area, any news about Barry Bonds would likely trump anything about the Athletics.

But it certainly had to rankle Mets folks Tuesday to see the front page of The New York Times' sports section. A huge picture of Alex Rodriguez smack in the middle up top, with this headline: “We Interrupt The Mets' Postseason ... “

There was a story about the Mets, by the way. In the lower right corner.

More of the same this morning, with Torre getting an A1 picture in the Times.

No wonder that over the years, Mets officials have been known to privately ask what they can do to win the public-relations game. The answer: not much.

Torre's in-or-out fate overwhelmed everything else this week. The main New York Knicks story in another city paper led with coach Isiah Thomas' comments on the Yankees manager.

Mets manager Willie Randolph, formerly a Yankees coach under Torre, was drawn into the discussion Tuesday, a day before the NL championship series opener against St. Louis.

“I didn't understand all the talk anyway. He deserves to be back,” Randolph said. “It shouldn't have been, in my mind, a thought anyway.”

Here's a thought that is definitely true: From the front office all the way down, most everyone in the Mets family usually feels slighted and overshadowed by the Yankees, especially in October.

And whether paranoid or not, Mets people are sure the Yankees plan ways to pirate away attention from them.

The Yankees laugh at such suggestions and say a lot of it is coincidence. Like that day in January 2005, when the Mets held a big press conference at Shea Stadium to announce the signing of Carlos Beltran, only to have the Yankees hold an event three hours later to introduce Randy Johnson.

Just happened that way.

These days, the Yankees leave the gamesmanship to the games, the six interleague matchups in the middle of the season. Torre is the one who says the hype and buildup is too much; the Mets relish the opportunity to play the Yankees, and probably would welcome a dozen more games each year.

At least on the field, the Mets would have a chance to win.