MLB

Yankees should celebrate hard-earned division title

O’S YES! The scoreboard at Yankee Stadium displays the O’s 4-1 loss to the Rays last night, which clinched a division for the Yankees. For good measure, the Bombers crushed the Red Sox, 14-2. (Charles Wenzelberg/New York Post)

Alex Rodriguez was at the plate with a man in scoring position in the seventh inning. In the days and weeks to come, that is certain to be an instant of shared obsession among Yankees fans. But at this moment, at 9:56 p.m., not one of 47,393 in the house were focused on A-Rod waggling his bat.

They were peering at the scoreboard in distant right-center field, so many of those eyeballs awaiting the “T9” alongside the Orioles-Rays game switching to “F.” You started to hear the murmuring as the spectators staring at their iPhones and BlackBerries absorbed the news: Jim Thome, out on a fly ball to left field.

The buzz grew as the news moved around a stadium delighted but dulled by a 10-run lead for the home team. And then, at last, the official news: the “F” on the scoreboard, Tampa 4, Baltimore 1,

the great American League East Chase of 2012 over at last.

That’s when the varsity scoreboard, the big one in dead center, took over.

“Yankees Clinch American League East!” it blared.

And that’s when the joint started to shake and shout, the noise spilling over the upper deck and onto the Deegan, out into what suddenly felt like the first official night of fall. At last, the chase was over. And a fresh one begins anew.

“I knew those cheers weren’t for me,” Rodriguez quipped later.

It isn’t always this way around here. Wrapping up a division title is usually a footnote to a Yankees season, a happy by-the-way. This one felt different. There may not have been the blinding joy inside Yankee Stadium that there had been at O.co Coliseum out in Oakland a few hours earlier, because that was a baseball story that had fallen out of the sky at the season’s 11th hour.

But it was loud. It forced a stoppage of play — mercifully, if you were one of the Red Sox on the field in dire need of a standing-eight count — and it lasted a couple of beats, and you know what? Why shouldn’t it have felt good, for everyone: players, fans, coaches, brass. Where is it written that every Yankees season must be a grim 162-game prologue?

“No one ever panicked in here,” Joe Girardi would say. “No one ever lost sight of what we wanted to do all along, which is win the division.”

The Orioles made that quest a little more interesting, forced the Yankees to stay sharp lest they drift into the netherworld of an NCAA-style one-and-done play-in game. And the Yankees responded to that challenge in the best way possible. They elevated their game.

“Not just one guy, not just a few guys,” Girardi said. “A number of guys.”

CC Sabathia turned in a couple of gems. Nick Swisher, for three years an October orphan, caught fire. So did Curtis Granderson, and Ichiro Suzuki. Even Russell Martin, whose season was so often a slog south of the .200 line, delivered a slew of clutch hits.

Then, of course, there was Robinson Cano, who across the final 10 days of the season made the game look so ridiculously easy it was like the old “Bad News Bears” movies, watching Kelly Leak turn the North Valley League into his own personal playpen. Twenty-four hits in his final 39 at-bats? You would be hard-pressed to hit .616 in a slow-pitch batting cage.

So they arrive to the tournament tested and engaged. There is no precise formula for the labyrinthine pathways of autumn. The Yankees have won World Series when they slept-walked through September, and lost in the first round when they have lit a torch to the home stretch. The crapshoot starts now.

But you have to believe they will be as ready as they possibly could be on Sunday, when they either will help spoil the Orioles’ splendid fairytale in Baltimore or halt in its tracks a Rangers’ resurrection in North Texas.

The end arrived at 10:33, Ivan DeJesus staring at a Freddy Garcia flutterball, the Sox’ nightmare over at last, one last 14-2 calamity. The Yankees’ dream ride just beginning. Patrick Ewing used to say it all the time back in the day, didn’t he?

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com