Yankee go home

 I know what Mike Torrez is saying today, wherever he is.

"Ha!" is what he's saying.

And Jim Rice? Carl Yastrzemski? Pudge Fisk? Fred Lynn?

"Ha!"

And also: "Take that, Bucky Bleeping Dent!"

After which they'd probably mention that Xander Bogaerts' homer went farther, and Kyle Schwarber's did, and neener-neener-neener, Yankees. In a wild-card game that evoked the 1978 one-game tiebreaker when Dent and the Yankees broke Boston's heart again, it was Bogaerts and Schwarber and the rest of the Red Sox who got some payback for Rice and Yaz and Torrez and the rest of those '78 Sox.

Score it 6-2, Red Sox, and Yankees go home.

As in '78, the teams finished with identical records, but the Yankees looked like the better nine for the last month of the season. They'd swept Boston in late September to move ahead in the AL East standings, and if there's such a thing as momentum in baseball -- there isn't, but let's pretend for a moment there is -- it looked clearly to be living in New York's dugout.

Well, neener-neener-neener to that, too. And time to put '78 in the ground for good.

Because, see, it's Boston, not New York, which now is on the high side of any playoff jinxes between the two, and it's been that way for awhile. The last time the Red Sox lost to the Yankees in the postseason was 18 years ago, when Aaron Bleeping Boone hit that walkoff in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS.

Since then, the Yankees can't win for losing against the Sox. It's Yankee Go Home every time.

In 2004, of course, they gagged away a 3-0 ALCS lead and lost in seven games, after which Boston went on to win the World Series and break the fabled 154-year-old curse or whatever it was. In 2018, the Red Sox beat them again enroute to another World Series title, their fourth since 2004.

In that same span, the Yankees have won the World Series once, in 2009. It's the only Series in 18 years in which they've even played -- since, yes, Aaron Bleeping Boone, who's now their manager.

Conclusion: The Red Sox are now the Yankees, with all that implies. And the Yankees are the try-harder nine.

"Ha!"

The whole city of Boston said it that time.