BALTIMORE — Admit it: this is the matchup that intrigued you. This is what you wanted to see. You are a Yankees fan and so there is always the specter of history lurking just over your shoulder and so this just feels right:
Orioles vs. Yankees.
In another time that meant Billy Martin and Earl Weaver trying to out-wit each other from opposite dugouts, teaming up to drive umpires to the brink of their wits. Or Bernie Williams taking a Randy Myers fastball deep into the night, a few hours after getting a helping hand from a Jersey kid in the right-field stands.
In our present context, it means the Orioles playing out the kind of season the Yankees never get to have, the kind that falls like a gift out of the sky and carries you piece by piece over 162 chapters. The Yankees’ mission, every year, is World Series or bust, and those are admirable ambitions. But they don’t allow for this kind of season, either. There’s no room for pixie dust when the American League Division Series is a stepping-stone, not a destination.
It means Buck Showalter in the opposing dugout, and for fans of a certain age that means a conflict of the heart. You will never root against the Yankees if that’s how your proclivities lie, but you will never forget the part that Showalter played in laying the foundation for what’s been damn close to 20 years of uninterrupted excellence.
“I don’t dwell on those days because I’ve got enough to worry about right here in front of me,” Showalter said a few weeks back, “but I will also never forget them, either.”
It also means the excellence housed in the Yankees dugout, a healthy assortment of stars, enough talent in the room that they are now 4-to-1 favorites to win the World Series and there’s no reasonable person who could argue against that. And these are Yankees who were asked to respond every day in September, on into October, and were equal to that task, who held off the Orioles, who locked down the division title on the last day of the season and avoided the gauntlet the O’s had to run through in Texas Friday night.
“We’re used to playing playoff baseball,” Joe Girardi said.
They are. When this all started for the Yankees, the Orioles were their contemporaries. Before the ’96 season the biggest pitcher on the free-agent market was David Cone, and Cone was inches away from becoming a Bird when the Yankees finally got a deal done. In 1996, they squared off in the ALCS. In ’97, the Orioles cruised by them to the AL East. Before Yankees-Red Sox turned into our baseball version of the Crusades, it seemed like this was going to be the signature Yankees rivalry for years to come.
Except it perished, disappeared, the Orioles slogging through baseball purgatory as the Yankees rose to dominance. The Yankees have played 132 postseason games since the Orioles played their most recent one, a gut-shredding 1-0, 11-inning loss to the Indians on Oct. 15, 1997.
For long stretches of time since, it was hard to believe these teams were once considered equals, harder still to recall a time like 1970, when the Orioles were so much more powerful that when the Yankees clinched second place in the AL East, even a hard-bitten manager like Ralph Houk — who had won two championships — ordered champagne for the occasion.
From 1998 through last year, the Orioles won 89 games and lost 162 against the Yankees. They were 15-39 in the last three years alone. They were awful at Yankee Stadium and somehow more pathetic at Camden Yards, since most games there were about 70 percent Yankees fans in the house.
And yet … here we are. In Baltimore. Orioles-Yankees. An old-fashioned, old-timey AL East battle, best-of-five, upstarts and stalwarts, Birds and Bombers, crabcake and cosmopolitan, “Tin Men” and “Mad Men.”
For a month they’ve been bobbing and weaving, staring each other down like prizefighters waiting for the final round. That starts now. That starts tonight. A pairing straight out of 1977, and 1996. And 2012. Who’s ready?
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com