Their Yankees legacy will last four-ever. Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada are linked through all of baseball time by winning championships then and now. They are Ken Burns- worthy.
Their story, though, is not just about being there and winning World Series — five for Jeter, Rivera and Pettitte and four for Posada — it’s about much more than that.
“This is about never quitting,” Yankees GM Brian Cashman says of winning the 2009 World Series, nine years after last capturing one. “They kept fighting to reach their goal. It’s an unbelievable accomplishment.”
This is a once-in-a-lifetime achievement for the Yankees’ version of the Four Horsemen.
“I don’t think you’ll ever see anything like this again,” Rivera says. “It’s going to be hard. You have to have everything. You have to have the ownership, the team, the city, the players, the hunger, everything. You not only have to be good, there has to be something more involved.”
It starts with the hunger to win one championship and then another and another.
“It’s really amazing how they can lead by example,” CC Sabathia says.
“That’s what I realized when I got over here: These guys want to win more than anybody and they’ve won a bunch of titles.”
Reggie Jackson knows about baseball legacies, and he makes this terrific point about how last year’s championship will have a lasting impact.
“I think it’s most significant for Andy and Jorge Posada,” Jackson says. “The other two guys are on the top of the mountain, but Andy and Jorge will have Hall of Fame consideration because of this. They have separated themselves from the norm and their enormous consistency for winning is almost unparalleled in the history of the game.
“I had a chance to win in 1982 and ‘86 with the Angels, after winning in [1972, ‘73 and ‘74 with the A’s and 1977 and ‘78 with the Yankees]. I had a chance to come back in ‘82 and ‘86, but we failed.”
The Yankees did not fail last year. Jeter, most of all, knows how difficult it is to get back to the mountaintop.
“This shows how long it can take to win,” Jeter says. “How you have to keep going at it. You have disappointments and bad seasons and you just continue to plug away, and we’ve been able to do that. You appreciate the road, too, even though it’s hard, but it puts things into perspective.”
There’s another aspect to winning.
“There’s a lot of luck involved,” Jeter says. “You get to the playoffs, there are eight teams in the playoffs, eight teams can win. Every year that we’ve won, you look at a play here, a call there, so we’ve had a lot of
luck, too.”
Like everything else, it starts at the top. There is no legacy without that.
“You have to appreciate the Steinbrenner family to give us the opportunity to stay here. You don’t see that much anymore, and not just in baseball but all professional sports,” Jeter says.
All four men are the same in that their focus and commitment were forged in their Yankee youth.
“When we came up, it was the time when the Yankees would trade guys,” Jeter explains. “They’d get rid of you right away, so you had to be focused and you had to perform and you had to prepare, and if you didn’t do that, they’d find somebody else to do it.
“We had success, but we realized what you have to do in order to have success,” Jeter says. “If you didn’t have that mindset, then you wouldn’t be here.”
Are the Fantastic Four coming back this season with the same hunger that they had in the beginning?
The Great Rivera smiles broadly and says, “Yes, there is a new challenge every season. That’s the beauty of all this. That’s what keeps you going.”
kevin.kernan@nypost.com