The first playoff game I ever attended at Yankee Stadium was game six of the 2003 American League Championship Series, when the Yankees came home up 3-2 with a chance to put the Boston Red Sox away. My roommate at my apartment up in Inwood had lucked into tickets via the online lottery — this was a thing back in 2003: You could just catch a break and win the chance to buy face-value Yankees payoff tickets — and we went fully expecting to see the Yanks clinch their fifth World Series appearance in six years. The Yankees had a 6-2 lead, but the Sox scored three in the seventh and two in the ninth to come back for the victory and force a game seven. Walking out to the subway afterward, my roommate and I came across a woman in a Red Sox cap being interviewed by a television station. Without missing a beat, my roommate — an ordinarily sane person who legitimately worked in academic-book publishing — slapped the woman upside the head, mid-interview, and yelled, “Fuck the fucking Red Sox!” A few people around us cheered wanly, and then we all just made our way to the B train heading uptown. The woman didn’t even look that surprised. “She wore a Sox cap to Yankee Stadium,” my roommate said on the ride home. “She knew what was coming.”

The Yankees would end up winning that series the next night on now-manager Aaron Boone’s walk-off homer; the Red Sox would get revenge with their comeback from a 3-0 deficit against the Yankees the next year, then end the Curse of the Bambino in the World Series. Hostilities had existed from the days of Babe Ruth to Bucky Dent to the ’90s, but those were the halcyon days of the Red Sox–Yankees rivalry, when Pedro Martinez was tossing Don Zimmer to the ground, when A-Rod was slapping the ball out of Bronson Arroyo’s glove, and Jason........

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