On the first day of spring training this year, Gerrit Cole was asked about his goals and whether winning his first Cy Young award was included in that.

The Yankees ace quickly pivoted to how his biggest goal was to win a championship.

Six months later, in a cruel twist, Cole is nearing the completion of a Cy Young season without the team success to make it even more meaningful.

“Whether we’re winning or not winning, it’s still my job,” Cole said this week. “Probably more so [meaningful] if we were winning, honestly.”

While Cole is in the midst of one of the best seasons of his career, the Yankees are at risk of wasting it.

A rotation that entered spring training with the potential to be one of the best in the league has largely crumbled around him, playing a part in the Yankees dipping under .500 on Wednesday for the first time since 2021.

“From a personal level, you’re bummed for the guys that are injured,” Cole said. “You want to be out there and competing. So on a personal level, you feel for them. From a team aspect, nobody’s going to feel sorry for you. So it’s just like, you gotta make the best of it.”

Cole, who will bring a 2.76 ERA (through 25 starts and 156 ¹/₃ innings) into Saturday’s start against the Red Sox, has been a source of reliability every five days, performing like the $324 million pitcher the Yankees are paying him to be. 

But the rest of the rotation was supposed to be bolstered by former All-Stars Carlos Rodon, Luis Severino, Nestor Cortes and Frankie Montas.

Together, through injuries and underperformance, that quartet has combined for 32 starts, 158 innings and a 6.66 ERA.

“I got a lot of questions about the rotation in spring training and my answer every time was, ‘We’ll see where it is in September. It’s on paper,’ ” Cole said. “You just never know how baseball’s going to play out. You just never get too high and never get too low. 

“It’s not over. And it wasn’t the greatest rotation of all time in spring training, either. You gotta find somewhere in the middle.”

The injuries opened the door for Clarke Schmidt to get an extended run in the rotation that he might not have gotten otherwise because of some early struggles.

Cole, who has served as a mentor for Schmidt, is pleased that the young right-hander got the chance to work through failure at the big-league level.

“John Smoltz says this all the time, we’re just not allowing our guys to fail at this level in order for it to pay dividends in the future,” Cole said. “You just kind of rip the cord away. The situation that we’ve had with the injuries has not allowed the cord to have been ripped. Boy, are we grateful for that. Very grateful. In another scenario, it might have been different, yeah. Because you know how things go.”

Rookies Jhony Brito and Randy Vasquez — who was optioned to Triple-A on Thursday, with Rodon set to return next week — are getting their own chances to show what they can do as big league starters.

Cole has been engaged in their starts, just as he was with Severino’s on Tuesday, at one point spending time going over pitches on an iPad with him in between innings.

Aside from Cole’s dominance, this is not how the Yankees expected their rotation to look in mid-August. But how Cole has handled it has impressed the coaching staff.

“Obviously it’s frustrating for guys like him and [Aaron] Judge who are at the front of this team and not necessarily getting the support you’d hope for to be in a better playoff position,” pitching coach Matt Blake said. “But I think he’s a consummate professional. He’s here every night helping the other guys work through their stuff. He’s out there getting his work in on a daily basis. He’s one of the most prepared guys in the league, so he’s a true professional in that way.”