BOSTON — It was with a mounting sense of destiny that the New York Yankees returned on Friday night to Fenway Park, where only last October they had handed the baseball to Mariano Rivera with a three-game lead to protect in the American League championship series.
They'd been playing their way back to this series ever since, to another chance to put away the Boston Red Sox, to find the outs that had never come, to kill the rally that had made the Red Sox champions.
A cool fall evening, the third-to-last of the regular season, brought not disparity to the American League East playoff race, however, but equality.
The Red Sox methodically beat the Yankees, 5-3, to draw themselves into a tie atop the division; both teams are 94-66. They'll play again today and Sunday, then check themselves against the Cleveland Indians, 13th-inning losers Friday night and a game behind the East leaders in the wild-card standings.
It was Johnny Damon, who scored the first and third runs against the Yankees, who stood in the postgame clubhouse and observed, "We've got three Game 7s here, and probably a fourth," meaning a potential tiebreaker Monday at Yankee Stadium.
Framed that way, the Red Sox have won five of those in a row, starting with Game 4 of the ALCS, picking up again in game 160 of this regular season.
"You never know about these two teams," said Red Sox designated hitter David Ortiz, the MVP candidate who drove in a run in the first inning and scored one in Boston's three-run sixth. "A lot of history. But history been changin' lately."
So it is.
With each big game they win, the Red Sox push Bucky Dent a bit further from their own previously pathetic history, and Aaron Boone gets a little hazier. And the Yankees become less the hunted and more the half-downed game. They'll have Randy Johnson on the mound today, and the Yankees hope to answer David Wells, the former Yankee who pitched seven sturdy innings Friday night for his 15th win.
George Steinbrenner for a decade chased Johnson, finally put him in pinstripes, and now will cross his arms beneath that white turtleneck and see if the Big Unit can pitch the Yankees to the brink of their eighth consecutive division title.
Johnson is 4-0 in five starts against the Red Sox this season, 12-6 in his career, but his ERA at Fenway is nearly five, and the Yankees might need better than that.
"The ballclub has bounced back so often," Yankee Manager Joe Torre said. "We need to do that [today]."
