HOUSTON — You know what the Yankees saw when they looked across the field Thursday night at Minute Maid Park? A baseball team that they can never be, can’t ever be. Nor ever even aspire to be.

Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing, right? Only a fool, given the chance to swap the teams’ histories, would agree to do that. The Yankees have won 27 championships since 1923. The Astros have won zero since 1962. The Astros have been to one World Series. The Astros look at the Mets’ history, sigh, and mutter, “Why can’t that be us?”

So it would be silly for the Yankees to ever wring their hands and say, wistfully, looking at the Astros: “Why can’t that be us?”

The Astros, who beat the Yankees 4-0 Thursday night, are entirely a byproduct of failure. On a night when the Knicks and 76ers, among others, enjoyed high placements in the NBA draft thanks in large part to their skill at being unskilled, their success at being unsuccessful, it actually seemed an appropriate night for the Yankees to collide with the Astros, who are starting to reap the benefits of being relentlessly brutal.

It’s not just that the Yankees have never had a four-year mudslide like the four years the Astros just completed: 56-106, followed by 55-107, followed by 51-111, followed by 70-92 which, to Astros fans, had to feel like 114-48. It’s that the Yankees would never be allowed to put a product on the field even remotely resembling that.

Yankees fans of a certain vintage wear proudly the scars accrued during the lean years of 1965 to 1975. But even as bad as those post-dynasty teams were, the worst season the Yankees ever endured during that stretch was 1967, when they went 72-90. In that 11-year drought, the Yankees actually had winning records five times.

Younger Yankees fans who similarly enjoy talking about lean times point to the Dallas Green/Bucky Dent/Stump Merrill era of 1989-92, the only time since 1912-15 the Yankees had four straight losing seasons. And even then, the nadir was 1991’s 91-loss team.

Winning is not a sacrament for the Yankees, or a birthright to their fans, it is simply the byproduct of necessity. Look, in many ways, those lean eras both yielded fruit — Thurman Munson, the cornerstone of the ’70s teams, was the fourth pick of the ’68 draft, a lofty position sealed by ’67’s pitiful ninth-place team. And we know how fully the modern-dynasty Yankees were stocked by the dark ages of the late ’80s and early ’90s (even if the biggest bounty of that losing, Brien Taylor, never threw an inning for them).

All true.

But those were still days before the YES Network, before a brand-new stadium, before a mission statement that, in many ways, is even more demanding than the ones, spoken and unspoken, that reigned during George Steinbrenner’s time. The notion of having a 106-loss season and then watching that number GROW two years in a row?

Look, for the Astros it may well work. Sports Illustrated already declared them champions-in-waiting last year, even when they were still a mile under .500. But they entered Thursday night four games clear of the rest of the A.L. West, and this victory puts them 11 games over .500.

This may still prove dizzying for a team that is still learning to win, that is relying so much on young players who are gold-plated talents but green in experience. But while the Yankees march out 30-somethings by the truckload, many of them not so far away from 40-something, they looked across the field at the Astros and saw youth, and saw speed, and saw aggression.

It probably wasn’t unlike the view a lot of other teams saw when the Yankees started to put things together in 1995 and ’96, when the kids started to come and the Yankees put all the hard lessons to work for them. The Astros sure look every bit the team of tomorrow, and may well be the team of today.

But yesteryear? Well, that was something that was so hard to endure that last year, in the season’s eighth game, an Astros game with the Angels pulled a Blutarsky — a 0.0 Nielsen rating. Zero. Point. Zero. Hell, even the infamous September 1966 game between the Yanks and White Sox that got Red Barber fired managed to attract 413 fans to the Stadium.

Now THAT’s pain. THAT’s suffering. The Yankees surely would like to get younger, faster, quicker. But not at that cost. Couldn’t happen. Not ever.