Yankees staring at unsettling Red Sox reality with season on brink

In an eyeblink, they are toe-tips-to-the-brink. In an eyeblink, the Yankees are looking at the potential of a postseason run that could be over after about 27 hours or so. In an eyeblink, the stubborn goblins that haunted them all season — bullpen, clutch hitting, second-guessable decisions — threaten to reduce this whole New York baseball season to a vapor trail.

Once upon a time, the Yankees defeated the Red Sox 19-8 in Game 3 of the 2004 ALCS. We know all about the decades of history that preceded that moment, how the Yankees always managed to give all of New England acid indigestion when it mattered most. But from that moment until 9:15 or so Tuesday night, the teams have played nine postseason games.

The Red Sox have won eight of them.

This latest one was a 3-1 final that was either a thriller (if you wear red vestments) or a stomach-turner (if you prefer pinstripes), a game in which the Red Sox all but threw a kegger the moment Aaron Boone hopped out of the dugout to remove Max Fried with one out in the bottom of the seventh. Fried was brilliant and he had a lead.