BOSTON — The more time goes on — and it’s been 20 years now — the more remarkable the accomplishments of the 1998 Yankees become. It is one thing to win an epic amount of baseball games in a season. Every few years, a team emerges that does that.

It’s finishing the whole thing off that’s the impressive part.

The ’98 Yankees — 114 regular-season wins — did. The 2018 Red Sox — 76 wins in their first 110 games — will have that burden staring them in the face no matter how many wins they add to that gaudy total. And like the 2001 Mariners (116 wins) and 2017 Dodgers (104 wins after playing most of the year at a 117-win pace), they will soon discover just how steep that burden is.

“There’s always pressure involved when you’re competing for a championship,” Joe Torre said in 2001, “but when everyone in the sport knows all you’ve done is win, they want to knock you off that pedestal in the worst way. It’s a special kind of pedestal.”

Torre was talking before the 2001 ALCS, in which the Yanks were paired with the Mariners, who had dominated the sport in precisely the same way the Yankees had done three years earlier. They’d been given a bit of a scare by the Indians in the first round, and manager Lou Piniella could already sense that the load of history was starting to weigh heavily on his players’ shoulders.

“We’ve won 119 games [including playoffs], and not one of them is going to help us against the Yankees or, if we’re fortunate enough to advance, in the World Series,” Sweet Lou said, perhaps a bit too presciently.

This is part of the thing that should ease the Yankees’ stress level as they negotiate their way through the remainder of the schedule. Yes, it is preferable to win the division and avoid the one-game monster gauntlet of the play-in game. Yes, the perks that go along with that are bountiful.

But for most of baseball history, there was an alternative.

And it wasn’t a good one.

Leo Durocher’s 1942 Dodgers won 104 games and never even got a playoff out of it because the Cardinals won 106. The only time Casey Stengel won more than 100 games as Yankees manager was 1954 — one of only two years in his 13-year tenure he didn’t manage in the World Series because the Indians’ 111 wins were eight games better than his group managed. And, of course, there were the 103-win Giants, who went home in the last year before the advent of the wild card because the Braves won 104.

But that isn’t the only reason the Yankees should feel good about themselves, regardless of where they sit at weekend’s end. For every dominant wire-to-wire team that has honored their regular-season dominance — the ’27, ’61 and ’98 Yankees, the ’75 and ‘76 Reds, the ’86 Mets — there are plenty of regular-season heroes who died fizzling deaths in October.

There are last year’s Dodgers, for starters. Forget the fact that they were well ahead of even the Red Sox’s pace after 110 games last year (78-32 to 76-34). The Dodgers actually won 13 of their next 17 to get to an astonishing 91-36 … then promptly lost 16 of their next 18 and half of their 20-game lead in the NL West. And while they did make the World Series, with 104 wins, they were bested by Houston in Game 7, and that’s what they will forever be remembered for.

Same with Piniella’s ’01 Mariners, who only managed one win in the ALCS off the aging remnants of the proud Yankees dynasty and thus became the second team to win 116 regular-season games (the 1906 Cubs being the other) yet not to win the world championship. Whether they (and their historical kin, the ’54 Indians) lost because of the pressure of their regular-season success or not, they are all linked by the same dubious truth, which Piniella co-opted.

Not one of those wins helped at all in October.