INTO the vortex of swirling hyperbole falls a dollop of unwelcome news, a spoonful of sobering truth. Baseball fans in two cities had begun to equate the coming skirmishes between the Yankees and the Red Sox in cataclysmic terms. Already the hype had blown through the roof.

Nothing is going to change that, of course. Not in Boston, where the local nine is a year-long obsession, the source of so much generational angst. And not in New York, where the idea of keeping the Red Sox in their place has become almost as compulsive a notion among Yankees fans as winning another World Series.

Not even dreadful, tragic news can alter the piles of propaganda already mounting along the roadways connecting New York and New England.

But it has certainly thrown things into perspective inside the Yankees clubhouse. The most indispensable Yankee is in Panama this morning, tending to the unthinkable, after receiving word two family members were electrocuted while cleaning the pool at his off-season home.

Part of what has made Mariano Rivera so critical to the Yankees’ modern dynasty has been his ability to shake off hardships and crises. But to date, these have all been limited to the field of play. Sandy Alomar once hit a playoff home run against Rivera that turned around a series in Cleveland. Luis Gonzalez once beat him on the last pitch of a World Series.

He always came back from those, because the best athletes always come back from the worst professional calamities. He came back to pitch three forever innings against the Red Sox last October, Game 7, a feat that may have been more heroic than the Aaron Boone swing that generated the series-winning home run.

After Boone’s ball cleared the wall, Rivera ran to the mound and collapsed in a charismatic spasm of glee, offering praise to his God, unable to move for a few moments because of the deep trance his joy had delivered. He has always been a man of great faith and great strength. He has built a church in his home village. His is a quiet devotion, a side of himself he has never been shy to share.

It will have to serve him now. It will have to get him through these dark hours. The immediate question Yankees fans will have, of course, is purely and coolly business: Will he be able to pitch in the ALCS? Will he be able to pitch well in the ALCS? As well as the Red Sox have done against him this year, how can he possible be expected to maintain his veneer of playoff invincibility?

That, at the end of the day, may be Rivera’s greatest salvation. He would not be the first to bury his grief in the exile of work, just among the most public. Though so many may try in the coming days, no one can truly equate a baseball series – even Red Sox-Yankees – to the loss of two human lives.

Two people named Victor Dario Avila, a father and his 14-year-old son, both of them close to Mariano Rivera, are gone. But life, as we all learn sooner or later, grinds on. Rivera is expected to be back in time for Game 1 tomorrow night; what isn’t expected, what can’t be expected, is how he will respond to being at Yankee Stadium. He will be there in body. Will he be there in mind? Can he?

Could you?

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He has always been a man of great faith and great strength. His is a quiet devotion, a side of himself he has never been shy to share. It will have to serve him now. It will have to get him through these dark hours.