BOSTON — Like life, the American League East is not fair. The Yankees might win 115 games and take the division by a greater spread than the 14 ¹/₂-game lead they left Fenway Park with Thursday night, and still eliminate only the Orioles from the postseason tournament. 

Even though Aaron Judge sat with a banged-up body, and even though Gerrit Cole did little to rewrite his troubling Fenway backstory, the Yankees held off the Red Sox, 6-5, to start this long weekend series and to reaffirm their Globetrotter-like superiority over the competition. 

But if the season ended today, the Red Sox, Rays and Blue Jays would claim the three available wild cards and join the Yankees in the playoffs. On one hand, that doesn’t seem like an alarming truth. These are the same teams the Yanks would have pancaked over six months, so logic holds that they wouldn’t be lethal October threats to the championship-or-bust cause in The Bronx. 

On the other hand, Boston, Tampa Bay and Toronto would be entering the postseason unburdened by the weight of expectation. Losing would be an acceptable option to them and their fan bases. If any of the above matched up with the Yankees in the Big Dance, it wouldn’t exactly be a reboot of Saint Peter’s against Kentucky. But under that scenario 100 percent of the pressure would be on the Yanks, a fact that could have a liberating effect on their opponent. 

For instance: Would the Yankees really want to face the nothing-to-lose Red Sox, the defining rivals who eliminated them twice in the past four years, if Boston takes momentum from a best-of-three wild-card series victory into a meeting with Aaron Boone’s overly rested overdogs? 

Probably not. And as much as Houston represents the most conspicuous hurdle separating the Yankees from their first trip to the World Series since 2009, the AL East also-rans can’t be discounted, even if the current standings show them all to be trailing by more than two touchdowns. 

“It’s a beast,” Boone maintained of his division. 

“Boston, obviously we’ve had battles with them forever. They’re always a thorn and they’re always tough. Alex [Cora] always has them ready to go. It’s a heavyweight division, what more can you say? But I think our guys relish playing in these kind of games against the best opponents, where a lot of eyeballs are on it, which you know are going to be here.” 

Here, as in Fenway Park. 

“They’ve been one of the best teams in baseball the last couple of months,” Boone said of the Red Sox, “so they’re starting to find their stride. They’re getting more [injured] guys back. You know these guys and probably a couple of others in our division are going to be there in the end.” 

Truth be told, especially when measured against last year’s turbulence, the prospect of dominating a division all season without knocking out anyone (outside of Baltimore) needs to be filed under “wonderful problems to have.” 

“I’m not frustrated by 14 games up right now at all,” was how general manager Brian Cashman put it. 

But Cashman knows the kind of stress a runaway regular season can put on a juggernaut in October. Back in the day, the GM lived it during his first year on the job. The 1998 Yanks would go 114-48, win the AL East by 22 games, and stare down a moment of ALCS truth — a 2-1 deficit to George Steinbrenner’s hometown team, Cleveland, which had bounced the Yanks from the ’97 playoffs — before winning it all. 

The core members of that ’98 club did have championship muscle memory to lean on, by way of the breakthrough title in ’96. The 2022 Yankees won’t find any such reassurance in their trophy case. 

Not that Boone or Cashman seem terribly concerned about that. The manager called this year’s Yankees “a way better team” than last year’s Yankees, in every imaginable way. 

“We have a lot of confidence that we can win any kind of game,” Boone said hours before his bullpen won, you know, any kind of game. He described the Yanks “as a group on a mission to be the best in the world.” 

Cashman is still talking to fellow general managers left and right in search of a deal before the trade deadline that makes his roster even stronger. He had a chance in the middle of ’98 to trade for Randy Johnson, to make the monster he’d helped create more frightening. Cashman ultimately decided he didn’t need to make that move, and Steinbrenner warned him that he’d better be right. He was. 

This time around, Cashman might make a different decision. Meanwhile, he reminded everyone Thursday that the Yankees’ record — now 60-23 — didn’t guarantee them a damn thing in the long term, including a free October pass against whatever AL East foe might emerge. 

“That’s the nature of the beast,” Cashman said. “I knew our division was exceptionally good and the best division in baseball, but I don’t really think about any of that. I just know that we’re good, and our players believe in each other and we believe in the team we’ve got.” 

That belief will drive the Yankees into the postseason, where they might be joined by three fellow AL East clubs. Those would be three pressure-free teams that could be dangerous after proving for six months that they didn’t belong in the Yankees’ league.