Let the venom flow for Sox-Yanks

Load the fridge. Stock the pantry. Book your spot on the big couch. Brace your bladder for five-hour games and 1:23 a.m. walkoffs.

After a 14-year break, the Red Sox and Yankees are once again playoff combatants.

And this time, the Red Sox are the “Alpha Dogs,” if not the “Dirt Dogs.”

Wednesday, Yankees fans were chanting “We want Boston” as if they had never seen the postseason. They got their wish. The Red Sox are everyone’s team to beat. But let’s not kid ourselves. A loss in the ALDS to these Yankees after their 108-win season would be catastrophic for the Red Sox. Or at least Dave Dombrowski. The blowback may be strong enough to turn Jersey Street back into Yawkey Way. The only prediction to make with certainty is profane. The only relevant statistic worth sharing is that Donald Trump won the same number of postseason starts as the entire Red Sox rotation. Zero.

America’s original “Dirt Dog,” Trot Nixon, will throw out the first pitch in Game 1 tonight. And this rivalry needs a Nixon now more than ever.

This is not your father’s Sox-Yanks hatefest. Not even close. Nor does it approach the vitriol shared by many earlier this century.

Gone are A-Rod, Jeter, Mussina, Mariano, Big Papi, Manny, Pedro and Schilling, or anyone else who gave us those four glorious days in October 2004. Nor can the physicality of past showdowns be sustained, especially in baseball’s “post WWE era” (as David Ortiz put it to me in 2016). Players now face lengthy suspensions each time a punch is thrown.

The Red Sox-Yankees conflict turns 99 on Dec. 26. On that day in 1919, the Sox sold Babe Ruth to finance Tom Werner’s revival of “Roseanne” (or something like that). Before Mookie and Judge and A-Rod and Ortiz, there was Munson and Fisk, Bill Lee and Graig Nettles, and Mike Torrez and Bucky F. Dent. Before that, it was Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio.

And so on.

The unmitigated bloodsport on and off the field during the 1970s is easily romanticized 40 years later. Watch the fights on YouTube.

Here is how intense it got: After Lee was assaulted by Nettles in the 1976 Battle of the Bronx, Lee referred to Billy Martin and the Yankees as “that neo-Nazi and his Brown Shirts.”

Martin sent a dead mackerel to Lee, with a note that read: “Put this in your purse, you (expletive).”

That’s when calling someone a “Nazi” actually meant something.

Lee still carries Nettles’ baseball card in his wallet.

“He’s up against the right cheek of my (butt) for eternity, and the smell and the view never improve for him,” Lee told SI last month.

Sadly, those days are gone. But there is a middle ground where Boston and New York can sports-hate each other without Pink Hats and Moonbats wailing “what about the children” or fans hurling batteries or smoke bombs at the other team’s outfielders before engaging in bare-knuckled fisticuffs.

It was too sickeningly Pink Hat perfect when the Red Sox lauded Jeter and Rivera, and the Yankees did the same for Ortiz. Not one in either city had a heart in it. The lovefest for Jeter at Fenway Park during the final weekend of 2014 was an historic embarrassment. Jeter’s baseball success was “RE2PECT” worthy, but there was no reason for Boston to hail him with flowery plaudits worthy of John Adams or Tom Brady.

Not since Joe Buck uttered those famous words “Varitek and A-Rod going at it” has the Red Sox playing the Yankees meant this much or been this intense.

New York is making “Yankees Suck” great again. Let the hate flow once again.