The Yankees were free-falling in a way they didn’t again until, well, 2020.

Toward the end of a 3-15 nosedive that concluded their regular season, the 2000 Yankees went to Tropicana Field, home of the terrible, third-year Devil Rays, and suffered a three-game sweep, the last two contests by lopsided scores of 11-1 and 11-3. Never before had they entered the Tampa Bay area, where George Steinbrenner made his full-time home, and come up empty. They paid a price before heading to Baltimore, their next stop.

“He left us on the tarmac for two hours in St. Pete,” Jeff Nelson recalled of Steinbrenner. “… That’s how much he hated it.”

Generally, I urge Yankees fans to let The Boss rest in peace. To appreciate that baseball’s economic and intellectual landscape has changed dramatically just in the 10-plus years since his passing and to remember that, at his worst, Steinbrenner traded away prospect (Jay Buhner) after prospect (Doug Drabek) after prospect (Willie McGee) for attempted quick fixes that fixed nothing.

Right now, though, as the Yankees and Rays prepare to face off in the American League Division Series for their first-ever playoff duel, on the heels of an intense, Rays-dominated regular season that escalated this rivalry to an 11? I wish Steinbrenner were around to see this. Because, as Nelson said, The Boss hated losing to the club that played in his backyard. He’d be amped up to new levels for this one.

“George took it personally every time we lost, and if we lost to Tampa Bay, well, he lived there,” Yankees president Randy Levine said.

An Ohio native who moved to Tampa in the mid-1970s, Steinbrenner was “civic-minded,” as Levine put it. In addition to being involved with numerous area charities, he regularly attended Tampa Bay Lightning games and University of South Florida basketball games. When Major League Baseball planned to expand for the 1998 campaign, Steinbrenner pushed for the Tampa Bay area to land an entry, a successful effort.

Of course, that didn’t mean he wanted to yield the Yankees’ hold on the region, one born of Steinbrenner’s imprint on the community which included first a relocation of the team’s minor league operations there — Derek Jeter’s first minor league team was based in Tampa — and eventually major league spring training as well.

“George used to say there are more Yankees fans than Rays fans in Tampa,” Levine said.

To Steinbrenner, everything was a competition. Dick Greco, Tampa’s mayor when the Devil Rays began play (they switched to the “Rays” in 2008), recalled playing doubles tennis against his fellow Tampa VIP: “I served a little softer to him than I did to his partner, and [Steinbrenner] said, ‘What the hell are you doing? Hit the ball!’ He was just that kind of guy.”

The Devil Rays initiated minor league play in 1996 at the Rookie level, in the Gulf Coast League, and that affiliate got blown out by the Yankees’ affiliate in the franchise’s first official game of any sort. Ken Dominguez, the GCL Yankees’ manager, told a friend that he received an appreciative phone call that day from The Boss, who told him, “Great victory today!”

When the 1998 Yankees lost their season opener, and the Devil Rays earned their first-ever win the same day to even their record at 1-1, Steinbrenner complained to Newsday of his group: “They haven’t won a thing yet. They’re 0-1, behind the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in our division right now. Maybe this is a little shocker. Maybe they’ll come back a little more focused.”

Whenever the Yankees and Devil Rays faced off in Grapefruit League action — when, generally, teams ease their veterans into shape and limit their travel for road games — players joked about it being “The World Series.”

“It could’ve been the second or third game on the schedule. It didn’t matter. He made the entire starting lineup go,” longtime Yankees first baseman Tino Martinez, a Tampa native, recalled. “We would bring the bullpen. We would bring everybody to that game. Oh, man. Joe Torre would tell us, ‘The Boss wants everyone going.’ ”

It didn’t ease tensions when Devil Rays founder and owner Vince Naimoli proved extremely overmatched for the job; The Boss, you probably already knew, didn’t suffer fools gladly. That Steinbrenner saw the Yankees play the Rays far more than anyone else — he attended virtually every game at the Trop and made only a few yearly visits to Yankee Stadium by that juncture — further underlined his Rays fixation.

“Three teams we played were must-win: The Devil Rays, Mets and Red Sox,” Nelson said.

Much has changed since those early times. Naimoli’s successor, Stu Sternberg, has put together a model organization and gets along splendidly with Steinbrenner’s son Hal, who runs the Yankees. Neither man will be publicly raising the already high stakes.

“Nowadays, I think he would be a little more impressed at how they’ve succeeded over the years with small payroll,” Martinez said of Steinbrenner. “But he still would have the fire to beat them.”

That fire would heat up what already will be a white-hot week of baseball. It’s the right time to wish The Boss could watch this one with us.