THIS ONE STINGS

H OUSTON — And in an eyeblink, it was gone, all of it: the hard-to-believe comeback, half an inch from the brink of extinction; the dream season stuffed with 108 victories of all make and model, all variance and variety; a chance to win a 28th World Series.

All if it, gone in a flash, gone in a blur, gone in a spasm of raw, abject heartache.

In an eyeblink, Jose Altuve joined the ranks of Yankees’ October serial killers, forming an unholy alliance alongside Luis Gonzalez and Edgar Martinez and Bill Mazeroski, a quartet of saboteurs who’ve eliminated the Yankees with one well-timed — or, depending on your point of view, illtimed — swing of a bat.

“So many different emotions,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said following this 6-4 loss that delivered the pennant to Houston for the second time in three years. “It’s the ultimate pain you can feel in sports, knowing all that so many put into it, knowing how good of a club we have. For it to end that way, it’s hard … our guys are hurting,”

Said DJ LeMahieu, who came so close to enlisting in a pantheon of forever Yankee heroes and whose moment will instead be a forlorn footnote: “We can look at ourselves in the mirror and know we battled, know we did all we could possibly do.” In the space of 20 forever baseball minutes, there were 43,357 folks inside Minute Maid Park — and a few million more back home, in New York — treated to all of the extremes that this remarkable sport allows.

The Astros were two outs away from closing the Yankees out before LeMahieu tried to join a select corps of pinstriped October idols, a group that includes his boss, Boone, and Chris Chambliss, and Bucky Dent, and Scott Brosius. The mood in Houston was funereal. We can only imagine half a continent away, there were battalions of New Yorker ready to dance on stars as soon as the inevitable happened …

Except after getting two quick outs in the bottom of the ninth, Aroldis Chapman walked George Springer, then fell behind Altuve, 2-and-0. Altuve let one slider pass for a strike. He wasn’t going to do that again, on the next pitch, an 84 mph spinner that was gone from the moment it left his bat.

“Chappy hung a pitch,” Boone said, “and a great player got him.”

In an eyeblink, this hard-tofathom season ended in the worst possible way. Everything about who the Yankees were in 2019, and what they were, was represented in that top of the ninth.

Of course it had to start with the captain of the no-names, Gio Urshela, leading off with a hard single, his fourth time on base in four plate appearances. Of the crowded pile of names that helped craft this splendid season — the Tauchmans and the Fords, and the Wades and the Estradas — it was Urshela who would represent those irregulars right to the end. And then, LeMahieu. All season he did things just like this, one clutch hit after another. As the season went along it began to dawn on everyone that he might