IN PREPARATION for tonight's pivotal Game 3, the Daily News asked 20-year-old Cole Hamels to write some advice to the 25-year-old who will take the mound against the Yankees. Here is his response, ghost-written by Phillies beat writer David Murphy.

Dear Cole:

Hey, man. Long time, no see. Five years, actually. You remember me, don't you? You should. I look a lot like you, except I don't have a wife, don't have a kid and can't legally drink a beer.

I am you, at 20 years of age.

I've heard a lot from Phillies fans over the past week or so, all of them wondering where I have gone. And let me tell you - these people are persistent. I don't know how they found me, but somebody needs to develop some kind of aerosol repellent. All day long, they complain to me about your performance this postseason, about how you have yet to get through the sixth in any of your three starts, about Game 5 of the NLCS, when you allowed three home runs in 4 1/3 innings. And if you think I have it bad, talk to 24-year-old Cole - he's changed his phone number three times since Tuesday.

For all of our sake, I thought I'd drop you a line. Because people really want to see more of me and less of you. And I thought that I might be able to help.

You probably already know what I'm getting at, since the Yankees are in town. But I'll ask you anyway: Remember that night in spring training 5 years ago when you and I first burst on the scene? The night that you said earlier this week "put me on the map"?

I still get goose bumps thinking about it. Our first spring-training game, 2004, and it just happens to be at Legends Field. Under the lights. On ESPN. Against the New York freakin' Yankees. Two years before that, we were sitting at the lunch table in the high school cafeteria. Now, we were stepping onto the mound and staring in at guys like Derek Jeter, who was coming off his sixth World Series appearance, and Alex Rodriguez, who was in the middle of a contract that would pay him approximately the GDP of Japan.

Remember how we felt as we walked from the bullpen to the mound that night? There were no expectations. Nobody would have blamed us if we'd left the game with a bad case of whiplash. But we dominated. We didn't just perform as if we were the best pitcher on the field, we performed as if we were the best player. We were young and confident and well aware of the physical gifts with which we'd been blessed. We struck out Jeter and A-Rod and Tony Clark out on 13 pitches in the fifth inning. For two scoreless innings, we did what we'd done in the 19-plus years leading up to that night: play baseball, and play it well.

"He pitched his [butt] off," veteran personnel man Dallas Green, who was at the game, said the other day. "He opened our eyes. We knew he was growing into stuff, but that was the first time he really showed us he was going to be special . . . He showed us pretty good heart then."

Which brings me to the point of this letter. You admitted yourself a few days ago that your struggles this season have been more mental than physical. Frankly, I think you might be too hard on yourself. Very few pitchers your age have endured what you have over the past 3 years. Sure, you posted a 3.09 ERA and won the World Series MVP last year, but you also pitched 262 1/3 innings, 72 more than in 2007.

According to Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci, you saw the second-largest innings jump among young pitchers last year. Of the seven pitchers who experienced the biggest increase in workload, four saw their ERA rise by at least 0.89 this season, including you.

"You track anybody's innings work and you will never seen a jump like that," Phillies pitching coach Rich Dubee told a reporter this week. "And hes paid the price a little bit this year."

But both you and the Phillies say you are healthy enough to overcome whatever fatigue your arm may be experiencing. The key, both of you say, is to avoid putting so much pressure on yourself, to pitch within your body's limits. You might not be throwing 92-94, as we did against the Yankees that spring night, but you don't have to. Because as crisp as your fastball might have been, your location was always the key. I watched your at-bat against Andre Ethier in the third inning of Game 5 during the NLCS. Three times, you threw a 1-2 fastball that was supposed to go out of the zone, and three times you left it on the edge of the plate, prompting Ethier to foul it off. Two pitches later, he crushed a fastball for a home run.

Dubee says that he thinks you are overthrowing, that you are trying too hard to manufacture the velocity that once came so easy. You say you think you are trying to hard to fulfill the expectations you set for yourself last year.

But back when you were 20 years old, there were no expectations. That night against the Yankees, there was no trying, just doing.

Tonight, you might be tempted to pressure yourself. This World Series is tied at 1-1. You and your teammates have never trailed in a postseason series. You are facing Andy Pettitte, one of the most prolific pitchers in postseason history.

But let me tell you something about Pettitte. Eleven years ago, he was 26 years old and struggling through a disappointing season. He posted a 4.24 ERA in 1998, nearly a run-and-a-half higher than the year before. In the ALCS, he allowed six runs and four home runs in a loss to the Indians.

But in Game 4 of the World Series, just days after his father had heart surgery, he dominated, allowing five hits in 7 1/3 scoreless innings as the Yankees swept the Padres.

"As soon as I saw the first pitch he threw, I knew we were in good shape," Yankees manager Joe Torre said that night. "He let it go, trusted his stuff."

And that is my message to you, just as it was 5 years ago.

Let it go. Trust your stuff.