See, this is the kind of story you want to hear if you’re a sports fan, a real one, a good one, the kind of fan who will spend the next week and a half with the American League Championship Series never wandering too far away from your consciousness. That kind of fan. Your kind of fan.
This was CC Sabathia yesterday, 32 hours before throwing the first pitch of the Yankees’ first ALCS appearance in five years, pressing the rewind button on his memory and vaulting back two Octobers. It was there, as a Cleveland Indian, that he stood with his teammates up three games to one on the Red Sox, nine innings away from the World Series, nine innings away from reaching the only pinnacle worth talking about.
“You know,” he said, “in baseball, you have to get over things and move on quickly . . .”
His voice trailed off. His brow furrowed. And here is where Sabathia became one with the fans who cheer for him, the fans who live and die with the ebb and flow of nine innings in October. Most athletes, they freeze-dry these hopes. They are too cool for these emotions. They tell you that as a pro, you have to get over things and move on quickly . . . and they actually do get over things and do move on quickly. There’s no crying in baseball, or anywhere else.
Sabathia?
He reacted the way you would’ve if you were an Indians fan two years ago, if you’d seen your team go from the brink of an American League pennant to allowing a 3-1 lead to dissolve like ice on a summer boardwalk. He reacted the way you will, as a Yankees fan, if these seven games against the Angels — seven of the most-anticipated games in recent memory that didn’t involve the Red Sox on the other side of the hyphen — don’t proceed the way you hope they do.
“I usually am a guy that usually watches the playoffs and watches the World Series,” Sabathia said. “I didn’t watch it that year. Just because I felt like we probably should have been playing.”
You see, that’s the reason why it’s hard not to get attached to this team, and to this season, because these Yankees not only accept the challenge of trying to win a 27th championship, they relish it. All around the clubhouse yesterday, all across this season really, there has been a distinct appreciation of what the Yankees have within their grasp. And just what it would mean to close the deal.
“It’s intense around here at this time of the year, man, seriously intense,” Nick Swisher said in the morning, before the Yankees briefly braved the mist before quickly heading indoors, where it was dry and warm. “I can understand why there’s so many people around here with gray hair.”
To Swisher’s immediate right stood Johnny Damon, who’s experienced the full range of October emotion, the good (he hit two homers in the ’07 clincher that capped Boston’s great comeback and halted the Curse at 86 years) and the bad (he was standing in center field when Aaron Boone’s forever home run left the yard in 2003) and the indifferent (the Yankees were 0-3 in Damon’s three pinstriped ALDS appearances before finally sinking the Twins).
He smiled when he was asked if the build-up to Yankees-Angels reminded him at all of the early stages of the two-year Yankees-Red Sox postseason epic
“That rivalry had a little bit of a head start on this one,” he said, but conceded that there is a difference in the level of anticipation and emotion the deeper you progress in the October tournament.
“Once you have two teams this close to reaching their goal,” he said, “then you have two teams ready to have some kind of battle with each other.”
Which is what we have. The Yankees won 103 games this year, the Angels 97, and each of those 200 victories pushed them ever closer to what we have now, baseball’s two best teams fighting for one World Series berth. As a fan, you can’t ask for anything better . . . well, except for one thing.
That your team gives you a reason to watch the World Series in two weeks.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com