Drama majors

Two years. Fourteen games. One incredible rivalry. Inside the unbelievable drama of the 2003 and 2004 ALCS.

The Yankees-Red Sox rivalry dates back more than a century, but it peaked in 2003-04 when the teams staged a pair of classic seven-game series.

BOSTON — Maybe the best way to tackle this is to start with a guy who saw both endings from the same vantage point.

When Aaron Boone cracked the 11th-inning home run off Tim Wakefield to win 2003 American League Championship Series Game 7 and send the Yankees over the Red Sox and into the World Series, Bronson Arroyo was warming up in the visitors’ bullpen at Yankee Stadium.

When Alan Embree retired Ruben Sierra on a groundout to second base 369 days later, vaulting the Red Sox over the Yankees in 2004 ALCS Game 7 and into the Fall Classic, Arroyo was … warming up in the visitors’ bullpen at Yankee Stadium.

“The first time was a slow walk across the field,” Arroyo recalled Thursday in a telephone interview. “Watching those guys celebrate, walking into our clubhouse, I was one of the last guys in here. You might have thought someone walked in with a gun and shot a few guys. Guys were crying.

“On the flip side of the coin, making the sprint from the bullpen into the mound [in ’04], I can remember celebrating and seeing Alex [Rodriguez] and Derek Jeter with their heads on top of the railing in their dugout. Finally, it was a long time coming that we got to do this and got to have them watch.”

When the 2018 AL Division Series between the Yankees and Red Sox kicks off Friday night at Fenway Park, it’ll mark the first postseason meeting between the industry’s most celebrated rivals since that memorable night in ’ 04 when the Red Sox became the first — and still only — team in baseball history to climb out of an 0-3 hole and prevail in a postseason series.

To contend that these Yankees and Red Sox must clear a high bar in order to match their predecessors’ theatrics and intensity, well … it’s just not fair. That bar won’t be cleared. While this series might turn out to be fun (let’s hope), it can’t approach in one series what that saga created in two of the most explosive series in modern times.

“Playing against those guys for those two years, it was so intense,” Arroyo said. “A regular-season game would feel like a playoff game most of the time. The playoffs were just at a level you don’t find anywhere else in baseball.”

This double feature arguably serves as “The Godfather” and “The Godfather: Part II” of North American professional sports in the last half-century. Individually, the two series were brilliant, captivating, exhausting. As a dual entry, with the events of the first year informing the second one, it’s nothing short of epic.

When and where else have we seen two high-profile rivals go at it to the max in consecutive years, with split results to boot? Not the Steelers and Cowboys, who never faced each other in back-to-back Super Bowls. The Lakers and Celtics came awfully close, with the Celtics prevailing in seven games in 1984 and the Lakers in six games in 1985, although the fact the historic powers faced off again in 1987, with the Lakers winning in six games, fogs the memories of what happened when.

John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian, quickly produced a pair of comparables when prompted: The Dodgers and Yankees split a pair of seven- game World Series in 1955 and 1956, and then the Braves and Yankees immediately did the same in 1957 and 1958. Pretty good! You had the Dodgers finally bringing joy to Brooklyn in ’55, Don Larsen’s perfect game in Game 5 of the ’56 Series, the city of Milwaukee’s only baseball title (so far) in ’57 and the Yankees erasing a 3-1 deficit in ’58 by winning Games 6 and 7 at County Stadium.

The Yankees and Braves have little other history, however — they faced off in the 1996 and 1999 World Series, after the Braves moved to Atlanta, and the Yankees won both — and the Yankees and Dodgers, on the other extreme, have so much history that ’55 and ’56 don’t stand out as much. The Yankees and Red Sox, who have engaged in so many memorable regular-season battles, including “Game 163” in 1978, faced off only in one other postseason bout, the 1999 ALCS, which now feels like an amusebouche for what was to come in ’03 and ’04.

Perhaps recency bias elevates the ’03 and ’04 ALCS to the top. The ranking gains strength, however, with each participant you engage.

“Oh, man, they were definitely the greatest series that I could remember,” said Johnny Damon, who won championships with the 2004 Red Sox and 2009 Yankees.

“Those series [against the Red Sox] during the regular season and more importantly the postseason are what I remember about my three years with the Yankees,” said John Flaherty, now a YES Network analyst. “Going to the World Series against the Marlins [in 2003] is not even on the list.”

The best way to dive through what transpired, to educate those who didn’t watch and jog the memories of those who did, is to catalogue the main events and players.

THE LEGENDS

Red Sox ace Pedro Martinez and Yankees manager Joe Torre already have been inducted into the Hall of Fame. Yankees closer Mariano Rivera will get in next summer, and his teammate Jeter will follow him in 2020. Red Sox designated hitter David Ortiz looks like a good shot for 2022, and ’04 Red Sox manager Terry Francona, currently leading the Indians, has a strong chance when he hangs up his lineup card.

Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina and his Red Sox counterpart Curt Schilling (’04 only) have inched their way toward the 75 percent threshold necessary for election, and if there’s any justice, Yankees Roger Clemens (’03 only), Rodriguez (’04 only) and Gary Sheffield (’04 only) and the Red Sox’s Manny Ramirez will outlast the moralists and enjoy their days in the sun, too. And with Jack Morris in, Yankees Kevin Brown (’04 only), Kenny Lofton (’04 only), John Olerud (’04 only), Andy Pettitte (’03 only), Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams and the Red Sox’s Damon and Nomar Garciaparra (’03 only) all have reasonable cases.

THE TURNOVER

Did you notice all the “’03 only” and “’04 only” mentions above? Both teams executed massive changes after the Yankees ousted the Red Sox in ’03. The Yankees bid farewell to Clemens, Pettitte and David Wells and signed Lofton and Sheffield, and then they shocked the world by trading for A-Rod, who nearly joined the Red Sox prior to that and had to move to third base to accommodate his frenemy Jeter at shortstop. Boston, meanwhile, swapped out manager Grady Little for Francona, traded for Schilling and signed closer Keith Foulke.

THE ENMITY

“Now the game’s a little different. You fraternize a little more,” Red Sox first baseman Kevin Millar said. “When we were doing our sprints before the game, there was no chit-chat. They did not like Pedro Martinez. They hated Pedro. [George] Steinbrenner did not like us at all, [especially team president] Larry Lucchino. So much of that made the rivalry more spicy.”

“There were personalities that really didn’t like each other,” Flaherty agreed. “Kevin Millar and Curt Schilling were guys you just despised. I’m sure they had the same feeling for guys our way.”

That went triple for the fan bases’ feelings toward the opposition. Jeter used to marvel at the ferocity of the boos he received at Fenway. Recalled Arroyo: “[The team bus] used to get a police escort to Yankee Stadium. You’d see a 75-year-old woman at Nordstrom giving you the finger as you rolled by. The Stadium was one giant circus.”

THE HISTORY

“We were a little bit scrappy. They were tall and rich,” Millar said. “We were trying to do something that hadn’t been done [since 1918, the Red Sox’s last title before ’04].”

“In ’03, I thought, ‘I can’t be a Yankee and all of a sudden see the Red Sox win this thing,’ ” Yankees reliever Jeff Nelson said.

’03 GAME 3

Clemens versus Pedro, a rematch of Game 3 from the ’99 ALCS. Pedro ratcheted things up by drilling the Yankees’ Karim Garcia with a pitch in the fourth inning. Garcia got the benches emptied when he slid hard into Red Sox second baseman Todd Walker to try to break up a double

play. And when Ramirez responded to a high (but not particularly tight) fastball by Clemens in the bottom of the fourth, Pedro wound up throwing the charging Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer to the ground.

“The idea of throwing a 72-year-old man to the ground is without precedent,” Thorn, the MLB historian, quipped.

That’s what we understandably remember the most from that game, yet the fireworks didn’t stop there. In the Yankees’ bullpen, Nelson and Garcia got into a brawl with Red Sox groundskeeper Paul Williams — or, as Nelson called him on Thursday, “the stupid grounds crew guy” — and wound up in legal trouble. After the game, Yankees team president Randy Levine ripped the Red Sox and Major League Baseball for lax security and engaged in a heated argument with MLB’s vice president of baseball operations, a gentleman named Sandy Alderson.

’03 GAME 7

In a rematch of Clemens and Pedro, the Red Sox jumped out to a 4-0 advantage and had runners on first and third with none out when Torre lifted Clemens for Mussina, who was making his first career relief appearance.

“[Jason] Varitek struck out, and I hit that double play,” Damon said, accurately. “That extra run definitely could have helped us out.”

For sure. Little memorably kept Pedro in the game for five batters in the eighth, as the Yankees scored three runs to tie the contest at 5-5.

And in the bottom of the 11th, Boone — whom Torre benched in favor of Enrique Wilson — crushed the first pitch he saw from Wakefield, the first pitch he saw all night, into the left-field seats. Boone had entered the game in the eighth as a pinch runner for Sierra, who had pinch hit for Wilson.

“The monuments came alive,” Nelson said, referring to the old Stadium’s famed Monument Park. “The ghosts bailed us out.”

’04 GAME 4

The Yankees steamrolled the Red Sox through the first three games of the ’04 ALCS, and Game 3 was a 19-8 blowout at Fenway. Every reason existed to think the Yankees were headed to a second straight Fall Classic and seventh in nine years under Torre.

In his Boston Globe column off that game, legendary sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy wrote, “They have one more game to make their case. Are the 2004 Red Sox a happy-go-lucky (then suddenly unlucky) pack of frauds who failed to show up for the biggest series of their lives? Or are they full of the stuff that makes a team special and historic?”

“Dan Shaughnessy, as angry as I was, you’ve almost got to thank the guy,” Millar said. “If I don’t read the word ‘fraud’ that morning when I’m using the restroom, I probably don’t come in as excited as I did. It worked.”

Before the game, in a conversation captured on camera, Millar conversed with Shaughnessy and, referring to the Yankees, said, “Don’t let us win tonight.” In the bottom of the ninth, with the Red Sox trailing by one, Millar led off with a walk against Rivera. His pinch runner, Dave Roberts, stole second base and scored the tying run on Bill Mueller’s single, and Ortiz hit the walk-off homer off Paul Quantrill in the 12th.

’04 GAME 5

Rivera blew his second save opportunity in two days, the only time he failed to con- vert consecutive save opportunities in 96 postseason appearances. Ortiz delivered the walk-off hit again, a single off Esteban Loaiza that scored Damon from second base. The Yankees’ hopes of winning fell when Tony Clark’s double in the top of the ninth bounced over the low right-field wall, preventing Sierra from scoring from first base.

“Losing an extra-inning game in that atmosphere can feel like losing a doubleheader,” Flaherty said. “You start thinking negative thoughts. After Game 4, it’s ‘Tough loss.’ When Game 5 goes the same way, you say, ‘Uh-oh.’ You go from thinking you’re sweeping to going back home, but it still feels like you’re in trouble.”

’04 GAME 6

The slap play. Need there be more of an explanation? After Schilling’s “Bloody sock” domination for seven innings, Arroyo (who had started the Game 3 debacle) relieved him for the eighth and had given up one run when A-Rod came to bat with Jeter on first and one out. What first appeared to be an error by Arroyo, as he fielded a dribbler and tried to tag A-Rod, became “the slap play” once the umpires — in the era before instant replay — overturned the call and ordered Jeter to stay at first. The fans went berserk.

“There’s nothing like standing in Yankee Stadium with people throwing beer bottles and batteries and a riot crew standing on the field around the whole team like we’re in Beirut,” Arroyo said. “It was intense.”

’04 GAME 7

A Red Sox blowout, with Damon hammering a Javier Vazquez offering for a second-inning grand slam and 6-0 lead.

“I was thinking about the year before, when we had an opportunity [against Mussina],” Damon said.

The Red Sox were especially thrilled for Wakefield, who had taken a beating in Game 3 to preserve others’ arms and then tossed three shutout innings to get the Game 5 win. His baseball legacy would not be tethered to Boone’s homer from the prior year.

“I don’t think it’s redemption,” Wakefield said. “I don’t know what to call it. I can’t think of a word to describe how I felt. Especially, it’s nothing against New York, but being able to celebrate it there, considering what had happened the year before when I had to walk off the field, was touching to me. It made me feel … I guess I was gratified, the way it turned out.”

Now, Boone, as the Yankees’ manager, tries to use those memories to help his team prevail in the long-awaited rematch.

“I kind of shaped in my mind that momentum, I kind of throw out the window in this thing,” Boone said. “Because it felt like every time obviously in those years, both teams were so good. And one team would kill the other team one day, and you would think, ‘Here we go.’ And the next day the other team would answer back.

“And in a lot of ways, our series this year during the regular season has played out a little bit that way. There’s been some lopsided games. Obviously, they beat us up here this summer in that four-game series [in August]. But otherwise it’s been a little back and forth like that.”

Back and forth, sure. Up and down, though? Ferocious and legendary? That’s not happening. All we can hope is that this becomes Chapter 1 to something bigger and better, the new ’03 to an upcoming new ’04.

“Those series [against the Red Sox] during the regular season and more importantly the postseason are what I remember about my three years with the Yankees. Going to the World Series against the Marlins [in 2003] is not even on the list.” — YES broadcaster John Flaherty, a member of the 2003 and 2004 Yankees