1 and Done or 1 of 12

This evening, under the lights at Fenway Park (for we live and play sports in the money-driven 21st century where just about every baseball post-season game is played at night), the Bronx's best apostles will battle the homestanding Red Sox in the winner-take-all American League Wild Card Game.  Loser goes home.  Winner goes to Tampa Bay to face the AL-best Rays in the American League Division Series.  

If either the Yankees or the Red Sox shall win this year's World Series, then they shall have to win twelve games.  This evening is either one and done or one of twelve.  

The last time the Yankees and the Red Sox played a winner-take-all postseason game was Game Seven of the 2004 American League Championship Series when the Sox obliterated the Bombers in Yankee Stadium to complete a historic comeback from a 3-0 Series deficit en route to winning the franchise's first World Series since 1918.  One year earlier, Aaron Boone etched his way into Yankees lore (and positioned himself to be awarded a managerial job fifteen years later in spite of zero experience) when he hit the game-winning home run off Tim Wakefield leading off the bottom of the 11th inning in Game Seven. 

Twenty-five years before Boone's blast into the Bronx's night sky, Bucky Dent had broken the hearts of Red Sox Nation at Fenway Park on an October afternoon.  For it was on October 2, 1978, in the season's 163rd game, which was needed to settle the issue of who would win the AL East and with it one of the then-two spots in the AL Playoffs, when the Yankees shortstop - batting in the top of the 7th inning with two on, two out, and the Yankees trailing the Red Sox 2-0, hit a Mike Torrez offering into the screen atop the Green Monster...

...and into history. 

Here is to the resumption of hostilities in baseball's best rivalry. 

-AK