"It was midway through the Yankees' 7-6 win last night against the Orioles in Yankee Stadium that YES broadcaster Michael Kay threw out a tidbit designed to give Yankee fans cause to swagger anew. Only once in the team's long history, Kay said, had the Yankees been in first place this late in the season and failed to finish."

Michael Kay looks like a pencil eraser. And besides that juvenile little 4th grade crack, he's also a pompous jerk and a moron.

And he's just done it. He just ended the Yankees season. Pretty soon, in about 12 days, St. Joe Torre and Willie Randolph can both go golfing at Wykagyl, pondering whether or not they'll still have jobs.

The Yankees have stuck their plum, fat thumbs in the eyes of the baseball gods for too long now. And last year, as Dave Roberts slid into second in game four, just two outs from a sweep, the Gods finally stopped taking it from the Bronx Bombers.

The Gods in heaven finally got sick of Ruth eating hot dogs and farting. They got sick of DiMaggio being an aloof jerk. They were tired of Mantle's drinking and Munson trying to get angel wings to learn how to fly (insert off-color bad pilot joke here).

And finally, the Gods of baseball sat down and listened to Ted Williams. He spoke loudly and bombastically, but he made sense. You had to swing up on the ball, as the pitcher has a 12% advantage coming off the mound. He spoke of hitting home runs when they didn't count and missing some of his best chances at a World Series title because he served his nation - not once, but twice.

He bragged that when Bob Feller finally reached the pearly gates, that he would finally get the best of him in heaven's full-scale replica of Fenway. And tears welled in his eyes as he described what it was like to see ole Needlenose - Johnny Pesky - be able to hold that World Series trophy high and put one of those gigantic World Series rings on his finger.

The Gods know. They understand. They listen. They respond.

The Red Sox, as beaten and battered as they are, will win the American League east title. They will win it, presumably, in the last game of the season. And it will come in, well, one of those Yankee fashions. Remember 1996? Remember that "true Yankee team?"

The guys that got them there to that title didn't have their own planes, eight numbers and three commas on their paychecks, and frighteningly blue lips (or blue man-parts and back acne either).

It was Scott Brosius who hit the big homer. It was Luis Sojo who came up with the clutch pinch hit slapper. It was Charlie Hayes who made the final FF5 scoring play to end the game. It was a rookie fireballer who set up the ninth for the erstwhile closer.

Get ready for the Bill Mueller clutch diving play and big double in the gap. Get ready for Alex Cora to come up big when his back is against the wall. Get ready for the other Manny, the new Clemens, and a kid who is just five months removed from rising and sleeping in the shadows of Utopia Parkway.

It's destiny now. It's our destiny. It happened that way last year. Curses be damned, the Babe is speaking in softer tones now, up there. Now it's Ted. Ted is bellowing and it's now Ted's curse - not so much as a spell or a voodoo, but mostly his language.

And it's karma - for all the pomposity that comes from the mouths of Kay and the equally as horrible John Sterling. It comes right back around. Just like Ron Burgandy's guns, "they'll gitcha; they'll gitcha everytime." (check!)

For as great as the only comeback from an 0-3 deficit in Major League Baseball history last year was - when the Sox were the ham sandwich to the Yankees Mama Cass - the measure of how far we as Sox fans and the whole Red Sox Nation (god, I'm really beginning to hate that term, esp. in light of the fact Shaughnessy came up with it and pardon the run-on sentence but it's my blog and I can do what I want, but you should all click on the link up top for Sheriff Sully and read his latest "Under the Bus" entry. It's priceless...)

Sorry, I digress...the measure of how far we've come is how we follow it up the following year. While I firmly believe that not making the playoffs is not the end of the world, I don't believe that is going to be the case. What will be great is the manner in which the Sox do make it.

Final weekend. Three games to glory - and sorry Dr. Charles, the boys down on Rt. 1 have that phrase trademarked - at the end of the season. A true season-ending series, as the one left standing when the music stops ought to breakout the Ping Zings and get going. And when this happens, with the Sox' big hit coming from one of the aforementioned players, it will be a total and complete reverse of fortunes. The Gods are on our side now.

I close this rambling stream of consciousness with this: a called to WEEI's Whiner Line a few weeks back made a funny and I stole it and have been using it as my own. As many of you know, that's how I get my humor. But the caller said something along these lines:

"5 games up. 5 games back. 1 game out. Back to 5 back. 1st place. Then 2nd place. Then nothing. Hey Yankee fans, welcome to the last 86 years of our lives."