With a plane to catch, a quick 3UP:

1. Getting traded to a team two-thirds of the way through a season is a strange experience. Getting traded to a well-established defending champion two-thirds of the way through a season is a strange experience times 10.

And I think Lance Berkman has always handled that situation well despite struggling as a player. Despite spending his career in one place — mostly as a No. 3 hitter and full-time first baseman for the Astros — Berkman waived his no-trade clause to come to a Yankees team on which he would be a supplementary piece. At this moment, Berkman is a platoon DH who hits in the lower-third of the order.

Yet he has offered the proper perspective on it all. Obviously, it was all different. No sense lying about that. But he said his desire was to see if the fire that had gone out in Houston still burned. He wanted to play meaningful games. He never kidded himself or the public. He said the Yankees were going to make the playoffs with or without him, and his lack of impact in the regular season meant that he was really along for the ride.

But several times when I did talk to Berkman during the year he talked about the need for a signature moment or two, probably in the playoffs. He knew he could not become Mantle or Jeter. However, he saw the opening to be, say, Aaron Boone; to make his short time as a Yankee significant by delivering when it matters most for the organization, in the postseason.

As I detail in this column, Berkman delivered a couple of those those hits last night and suddenly he felt like he had joined the band.

2. There was a lot of worry about Andy Pettitte and his readiness for the postseason due to a groin injury that limited him to 13 1/3 innings from mid-July to the end of the regular season. And then Denard Span won a 10-pitch at-bat to open the game with a single – a terrible combination outcome of using up what was expected to be limited pitches for Pettitte while getting on base.

But Pettitte is magnificent at managing a game. He is the anti-A.J. Burnett. He has the ability to execute pitches in the hottest moments of games and to limit damage. Pettitte induced a double-play grounder from the next hitter, Orlando Hudson, and he was off to, believe it or not, his longest playoff outing since Game 1 of the 2005 NLDS when he was with the Astros. It was the first time he pitched as long as seven innings in the playoffs for the Yankees since losing the decisive Game 6 of the 2003 World Series. That also was the last time – before last night – that Pettitte pitched as many as seven postseason innings and gave up two or fewer earned runs.

3. Another worry disposed of was if the Yankees could turn it back on after playing so badly late in the year and falling into the wild card. I was extremely critical of Joe Girardi’s managerial style and his refusal to push harder for a division title and home-field advantage. I knew the stats: that 30 of the previous 60 DS and LCS have been won by the team without home-field advantage; or in other words a team had as good a chance to advance without home-field advantage as with it. Yet I thought the mixed messages of the Yankees manager on what was or wasn’t important was dangerous.

It looks as if he was right and/or that Minnesota shut off even more late in the season, losing eight of its final 10 games.

At this moment, all four Division Series games have been won by the road team. Tampa Bay won the AL East and lost two at home to the Rangers. Texas was actually 0-12 on the road this year in the regular season against the other three AL playoff teams.

So more and more we are learning that trying to surmise what will happen in the playoffs from regular-season matchups or how teams finished might be folly. Well, except it is looking more and more as if the Twins simply cannot solve the Yankees in October.