There was a breakdown in the cosmic order on Wednesday.
At least that's how it felt to Yankees fans: all the old myths, the old beliefs in curses and destiny, had been shattered, left to blow about the chilly field at Yankee Stadium along with empty Cracker Jack boxes and tattered hot dog wrappers.
And the Yankees' very identity as destiny's darlings had been shredded as well in a spectacular reversal of fortune in which baseball's eternal losers, the scruffy, hopelessly jinxed Boston Red Sox, pulled off the unimaginable: toppling the once-proud Yankees in the most shaming and mind-boggling fashion -- after the Bronx Bombers had been ahead, three games to none, in the American League Championship Series and a mere three outs away from the World Series.
For Yankees fans, it was not only a shocking humiliation, it was also a stunning fall from grace. Gone was the club's mythic sense of itself as a team of consummate pros, players who make all the clutch plays, always pull off the most impossible, last-minute comebacks. Instead of another highlight reel that could play endlessly on the YES Network, there were cheeky headlines shouting "Damned Yankees" and "The Choke's on Us." Instead of Bucky Dent and Aaron Boone, there was this: The galling sight of Red Sox players celebrating on hallowed stadium ground, only yards from Monument Park. And as Mike Francesa, a longtime Yankees fan and a talk show host on radio and television, noted, it happened on Mickey Mantle's birthday no less.
The team hailed as the team of the century is now mocked for pulling the biggest choke job in the annals of sports. The ghost of Babe Ruth was dead. The tide of history had turned. Karma had left the Bronx and fled north up the Eastern corridor.
Certainly anyone who was not a die-hard Yankees fan would say there was a kind of poetic justice to it all: an end to the dominion of the Evil Empire, a stake in the heart of the richest, most storied franchise in sports history. After 26 championships, after years of George Steinbrenner's outspending everyone, after decades of Yankees fans' taunting Boston with chants of "1918," wasn't it finally someone else's turn? And who better to do it than the Red Sox -- national symbols, along with the hapless Chicago Cubs, of the perennial underdog?
And there were other morals to be drawn from the narrative. This is what happens when you don't cherish a home-grown star like Andy Pettitte and let him go. This is what happens when you chase after All-Stars like Kevin Brown, Alex Rodriguez, Kenny Lofton and Gary Sheffield, who are hardly true-blue, pinstriped Yankees. This is what happens when you think you can buy a championship team and strip-mine your farm system. This is what happens when you have the hubris not to correct obvious flaws on the pitching staff, like not having any ace left-handers.
Yes, Yankees fans have been horribly spoiled over the years. We did not know the pain of Boston. Or Chicago. Or even the pain of Jets, Mets and Knicks fans. We have taken tradition, luck and money for granted. And so there was that morality lesson as well.
Many Yankees fans had grown so entitled that they practically assumed a trip to the World Series was an annual autumn rite, and now that illusion has been smashed. And because of the shocking way in which the Yankees lost, the realization that this was truly the end to the dynastic hopes that were planted in 1996, is hitting home.
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