NEW YORK — It was late 2005 at Mario’s Restaurant in the Bronx — “ironic, right?” Howie Rose jokes — where, around a table of four, he and Gary Cohen sat with their wives, toasting the end of their broadcast partnership.

They had just spent two of the most enjoyable years of their careers together. But the mood was not bittersweet. Gary had just taken a job he never imagined he’d want, as the lead play-by-play voice for a new TV network, SNY. Howie had been promoted to the No. 1 slot on the club’s radio broadcasts.

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“We both knew that, if we played our cards right, this could last the rest of our career,” Howie says of that night. “I’m just so proud of the way it’s worked out, as much for Gary as for me. I know what it means to him to be Gary, and I think he knows what it means to me to be Howie.”

On Saturday, alongside Howard Johnson and Al Leiter, Gary and Howie — what Mets fan knows them as “Cohen and Rose”? — will be inducted into the Mets Hall of Fame. It will be a surreal moment for both of them, as high an individual honor as they could receive from the franchise they grew up obsessed with as kids in Queens in the 1960s. It’s that shared personal history, though, that makes them so happy to be celebrated together.

“He calls me his brother from another mother, and I’ve always talked about how we’re kindred spirits,” says Howie.

“We didn’t know each other as kids,” Gary says, “but we had very similar experiences as kids.”

It will be those days and nights in Shea Stadium’s upper deck that will be top of mind for each.

“I think about all the people that I knew growing up who also sat in the upper deck at Shea Stadium, and any one of them could have been in this role,” says Gary. “I’m just the person who’s fortunate enough to have this job. And I never forget what it’s like sitting in the upper deck at Shea and caring and learning and knowing.”

“We’re both proud to go in as individuals, don’t get me wrong, you know? But at the same time, I think the recognition that we get for representing who we represent,” Howie says while pointing to the upper deck, “makes this sweeter than it might have been.”

By the time the two met in 1988, they had forged different paths in broadcasting. Gary had traveled the more traditional route through the minor leagues; that summer of ’88, he was at Shea for what was essentially a one-game audition to sit next to Bob Murphy starting in 1989. Howie had stayed in the New York market, working his way up on different radio stations to hosting Mets Extra, taking calls from listeners after games. It did not take long for them to realize that their paths to the Mets were very similar.

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“We bonded very quickly,” Gary says. “Although we were different people, we share a lot of the same sensibilities about what’s important to Mets fans and how to look at things from the perspective of a Mets fan.”

“We could sit back and go, ‘Remember this game?’ ‘I remember that game!’” Howie says.

That dynamic reached its peak in 2004 and 2005 when they worked in the radio booth together.

“We were all in sync right from the get-go,” longtime producer Chris Majkowski once said. “Sometimes I felt between the two of them, what did I really need to be looking up? You’re talking about the two encyclopedias there.”

“If you were a scout and you were evaluating Gary’s broadcasting abilities in the player’s vernacular, there’s f—— 80s all over the place,” says Howie, who is passionate about the impact those two years in the radio booth with Gary had on his career. At that point, Howie was calling Islanders and Mets games on TV. He wasn’t sure how much he wanted to move to radio, wasn’t sure how he’d possibly handle a full slate of baseball games on top of his hockey schedule.

Gary made it easier.

“Thank God for Gary, because I might have been one sour, miserable son of a bitch for those two years,” Howie says with a chuckle. “Gary made it all worthwhile.”

Some of it was the big stuff. Howie talks about absorbing all the descriptive detail that Gary could fit between calls — “the obligation to complete a call,” he says, that exists on radio more than television. Some of it was smaller. Howie points to his scorebook: “I had never used first names.” Next to Gary, he learned not to risk forgetting one.

How much better a broadcaster is he from that experience?

“Infinitely,” Howie says without hesitation. “I learned more about how to do baseball on radio in those two years than I did in all the years before and have in all the years since.”

“Fifteen years with Murph, I pinched myself every day that I was sitting in the same booth as the guy I grew up with under my pillow,” Gary says. “Eighteen years with Keith and Ron, they’re like brothers to me. But those two years with Howie were incredibly special.”

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Gary has called his two years in the booth with Howie his “most enjoyable years in broadcasting.” He was concerned, at first, that the two could be too similar. After all, he thought his partnership with Murphy had worked because of their obvious differences.

Instead …

“It was a gas from day one,” Gary says now. “You know, we could finish sentences, we could bounce things off each other. I’d make a reference, he’d know exactly what I was talking about. It was just so delightful on a daily basis.”

Now serving as the maestro of a three-man TV booth, Gary cherishes how those years with Howie prepared him for the other role.

“Moving from radio to TV, you realize that the ability to work with others is paramount,” he says. “Having had the experience with Howie of a more conversational broadcast certainly prepared me better for TV than I would have been prepared otherwise.”

The night Gary will never forget is August 3, 2004 — the night Bob Murphy passed away. He and Howie were in the booth in Milwaukee.

“That entire nine innings were a tribute to Murph, in big ways and in subtle ways — dropping in his lines and reminiscing about his calls and about him personally,” Gary says. “And it was just so perfect because we both came from that place of having grown up with Murph, understanding his impact on us and on the Mets fan base.”

For succeeding generations of Mets fans, Gary and Howie have had that same kind of impact that Murphy, Lindsey Nelson and Ralph Kiner had on them.

“I just know what it felt like for myself as a kid growing up, that those three guys were the sound of Mets baseball,” Gary says. “For me to even consider the possibility that people look at us in the same way, it’s beyond my comprehension.”

“That is the nicest thing you can say,” Howie says. “It’s an affirmation that your life’s work wasn’t in vain, you know? That it wasn’t just satisfying to me — that somebody else drew some pleasure from it. I can’t even articulate how powerful an emotion that is.”

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Howie pauses.

“How’s Gary described it to you?”

(Top photo of Gary Cohen and Howie Rose: Alex Traitwig, Chris Chambers / MLB / Getty Images)

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