Worth rooting for Yankees-Red Sox rivalry to reach 2003-04 heights again

Somehow we are closing in on 20 years since the most ferocious chapter of Red Sox/Yankees reached 212 degrees Fahrenheit. The Red Sox and the Yankees still share a division, and the games they play — like the four at Yankee Stadium this weekend — are still entertaining elements of the summer.

They’ve even played in the playoffs since those epic encounters of 2003 and 2004, and while they tried to generate some old-school mutual disdain — remember Aaron Judge whistling “New York, New York” as he left Fenway Park after Game 2 of the ALDS? — even that wasn’t the same. Not really, not entirely.

No. The era of Sox/Yanks from 2003-04 set a bar that was never reached previously, for all the ill will of Fisk/Munson, for all the wonderful memories of the pennant chase of 1978, for all the lyrical remembrances of the Summer of ’49, for all the angst that used to cripple certain elements of Red Sox Nation whenever the name “Frazee” was uttered.

Those 2003-04 teams were the Frazier and Ali of baseball, and qualified as such because each delivered a knockout. For all the terrific history of Boston-New York baseball, it could never really qualify as a rivalry because for over 80 years only one side won. The Yankees/Sox rivalry was like the rivalry between the hammer and the nail.

It was a terrific “feud.”

It was an excellent “dispute.”

But it didn’t become a true rivalry until 2003 and 2004, a time when the schedules were still heavily skewed toward playing teams in your own division, so across those two seasons the Yankees and the Sox played 38 times. The Sox won 20 of those games, the Yankees 18. They met in the ALCS both years, went the distance both times: Yankees 7, Red Sox 7.

“I’m a sports fan,” Aaron Boone said Thursday afternoon, a few hours before the first-place Yankees kicked off an intriguing series against the wild-card-hopeful Red Sox. “I have these moments in sports that you know where you were and you remember and you have a story around it. Hearing the stories over the years of people, whatever side of the ledger they were on, that have an intimate, memorable story around it, that’s been neat.”

Boone, of course, was referring specifically to the forever moment that he created, that he crafted, the home run he clobbered off one of the late Tim Wakefield’s knuckleballs that gave the Yankees the 2003 pennant with a 6-5 win in Game 7 of the ALCS.

That night, Oct. 16, 2003, as he was being soaked with champagne and saluted by his teammates, Boone had giddily said, “What I want to know is this: What are all of these people doing in my dream?”

Boone said that he doesn’t often dwell on his greatest single swing as a ballplayer, “only when people ask me about it or talk to me about it or have a story about it. That’s what’s been cool over the years, is meeting different people.”

The thing about that chapter of Sox/Yanks, what makes it unique and almost unprecedented, is that it was easy to believe we’d seen a one-of-one experience that October. There was no way to top that. How do you better the drama of the Yankees, five outs from elimination, rallying back from 4-1 down off Pedro Martinez, one of the two or three best pitchers of that generation?

Red Sox fans said — as the kids today might — “Hold my beer.” And then authored the single greatest comeback — or collapse, depending on if you hang your hat in New England or New York — in the history of professional sports. And when that happened, impossible as it may have seemed, at the time we said: “Of course that happened.”

So did this: Angry Yankees officials, impatient that Red Sox fans wouldn’t leave the Stadium after Game 7 in ’04, approached George Steinbrenner. And Steinbrenner, who detested the Red Sox more than any human alive, shook his head.

“Let them stay as long as they want,” he said. “They earned it.”

Yes. It’s different now. It’s still sweet for Yankees fans when they beat the Red Sox, and vice versa. It’s just not as … essential as they used to be. Maybe someday. It’s worth rooting for. It really is.