Fast-forward past 1951 (Mickey Mantle makes his major league debut versus the Red Sox, Yanks win 4–0), and 1952–53 (the Red Sox lose thirteen in a row to the Yankees), and 1956 (Ted Williams fined for spitting at Boston fans after misplaying a Mickey Mantle fly ball, an incident Williams will never live down). Let us forget 1960, when the Yankees set the record for team home runs (192)…against Boston. And let us by all means wince past Roger Maris’s 61st home run, which came against Tracy Stallard…who pitched for Boston.

No, let’s move directly to 1978. “Nothing compares,” says Dan Shaughnessy in The Curse of the Bambino. “The mind calcifies. This was the apocalyptic, cataclysmic fold by which all others must be measured.” Yeah, and it was pretty bad, too. On July 20th of that year, the Red Sox led the Yankees by fourteen games.[4] Then came the infamous Boston Massacre, in which the Red Sox were swept—not at Yankee Stadium but at Fenway—by the Bombers in a four-game series. The Sox ended the season in a flat-footed tie with the Yankees, and lost the playoff game on Monsieur Dent’s Punch-and-Bucky home run, the pop fly heard ’round the world. That’s Heartbreak Number Two.

In 1999, the Red Sox went into postseason as the wild-card team and once again faced the Yankees. The Yanks won both of the first two games in the Stadium, both by one run; they qualify as Heartbreaks Number Three-A and Three-B. (Game 1 of this series, you may remember, wasthe one in which Chuck Knoblauch dropped a throw from Scott Brosius; the ump then ruled he’d dropped the ball while transferring it from his glove to his hand.) The third game, the first played at Fenway in the ’99 series, offered some small measure of revenge. In that game, Sox batters pummeled first Roger Clemens and then a parade of relievers, Pedro Martinez fanned twelve, and the Red Sox won, 13–1. It was the most lopsided loss in the Yankees’ postseason history, but in the end it made no difference; you can’t carry any of those runs over to later games, can you? In the following game, the Red Sox were victimized by another bad call, this time by Tim Tschida,[5] and the Red Sox ended up losing, 9–2. The Yankees won the final game, 6–1. That’s Heartbreak Number Three-C.