I'm thirty-four years old. That means a couple of things. 

1 - I have a hard time staying awake past midnight.
2 - Life is less about fun and more about responsibility.
3 - I can no longer act like a kid unless-
4 - It's with my kids, and-
5 - I've been a Yankee fan for roughly thirty years.

Thirty years seems like a long time, but it's not. There are people who have been Yankee fans longer. They can wax poetic about Old Yankee Stadium, Mantle vs. Mays vs. the Duke, beating the Dodgers, DiMaggio's streak, when Scooter was an actual player and not a broadcaster. I can't compete with any of that.

The only thing I have in common with my older fellow Yankee fans is our collective hatred of the Red Sox. Sure, we all admire the numbers of retired Yankee greats and not-so-greats that adorns the left field wall at Yankee Stadium, a collection of some of the greatest names in baseball and some guys non-New Yorkers couldn't care less about. But we don't share in the same memories. Leyritz's homer in game four? How about Don Larsen's perfect game in the World Series? Buzz off, rookie...

We all hate the same uniform, though; a uniform that hasn't changed much over the last one hundred years, that's played in a home ballpark that opened conspicuously close to the maiden voyage of the Titanic and soon embarked on a title-less streak that lasted eighty-six years. We can't relate to the same players or even the same style game, but we can relate to the shared enemy: the Boston Red Sox.

 
So it saddens me to discover after DiMaggio and Williams, Fisk and Munson, Pedro and Zimmer, that the competitive fire, the bottomless pit of bile that resided in the stomachs of each of our fan-bases, has basically dried up.

 
The games don't mean what they used to. Yankee Stadium used to crackle with energy every time the Yankees and Red Sox played. "Boston Sucks!" chants were a dime a dozen, 1918 signs scattered generously throughout the stands.

 
Not anymore. Now, the players are friendly towards each other, cordial even. Watch anytime Derek Jeter or David Ortiz get on base. They practically hug it out with the infielder next to them, chatting about God knows what and where they're going to dinner that night. Last weekend, there were EIGHT hit batsmen.  After the game, all of the players conceded that none of them seemed to be intentional.  ARod was hit by a pitch square in the back earlier in the year. It wasn't intentional but that shouldn't matter. ARod makes $250 million. Thirty years ago, a Red Sox player would have found themselves on their backs the next inning.  

 
Not in the love fest that is now the Yankees - Red Sox "rivalry."

 
The whole dynamic between the Yankees and Red Sox has been ruined, mostly because the Red Sox took it upon themselves to win a few World Championships. It was a purely selfish act that did nothing for baseball except ruin the best rivalry in sports.

 
It was turning into an annual ritual. The Yankees would beat out the Red Sox for the division. They'd both make it into the playoffs due to the Wild Card and meet in the ALCS, where the Yankees would proceed to crush Red Sox Nations' dreams of ever attaining a world championship, whether it be in six games or the bottom of the eleventh inning when a knuckleballer gives up a homer to a mediocre infielder.

 
This little arrangement seemed to be working out for everyone. Boston was able to fester under its hatred of New York for being a bigger city and having better sports teams. New Englanders reveled in their disgust, wearing their angst and perennial disappointment like a badge of honor. Globe and Herald newspaper writers constantly reminded the masses that everything that could go wrong for a Boston team would, because Bostonians held the fatalistic belief that they were doomed to never win a championship again.

 
And then the 2004 playoffs happened.

 
Everything is different now. The Red Sox have won two World Series in four years. The Celtics are a force to be reckoned with while the Knicks are a punch line. New Englanders can now gloat where before they could only spew insults about how much better Nomar was than Jeter. The dynamic has changed. Boston has beaten New York. For now, Boston is on top.

At least the Patriots didn't go 19 - 0...

Scott Ham can be reached at scotth23@hotmail.com