IT’S different this year, in a way it hasn’t been in more than half a century.

For all the time we spend talking about the Red Sox-Yankees “rivalry,” we haven’t often been talking about a rivalry at all.

Army-Navy is a rivalry. Michigan-Ohio State is a rivalry. The Dodgers and the Giants is a rivalry. Both teams on either side of the hyphen have plenty of tales to tell about games won, games lost, seasons that ended in glory and seasons that were ruined by failure.

Yankees-Red Sox? As long as they’ve occupied each other’s space, the same thing has happened, time after time after time, year after year after year. Lucy and Charlie Brown have more of a rivalry. This is a feud. It is a century-long quarrel. The Yankees have almost always had the better team. The Red Sox have almost always been flawed. The results were as predictable as the tide.

This time?

At the very least, they are even. Although that isn’t the way most of baseball, or most of America, sees it. They see a Red Sox team unlike any they’ve ever seen before, deep in starting pitching, rich in offensive reserve, completely together in mission and motive. In many ways, they look the way the Yankees usually look coming into one of these series.

And the Yankees, they look the way the Red Sox have always looked: heavy in the lumber department, average on defense, well below average with starting pitching.

Forget the home-field advantage. Forget the fact that the Yankees finished three games ahead of the Red Sox during the regular season.

The Red Sox are the hunted this time around. The Yankees are the hunters. It wasn’t that way last year, or in 1999, the first time they met in the ALCS.

It wasn’t that way in 1978, despite the fact that the Red Sox spent so much of the summer in first place. The Yankees were the deeper team, they had the better pitching staff, and for all the drama attached to that one-game playoff at Fenway Park, it’s likely the Yankees would have dominated a seven-game series if it had come to that.

No, you have to go all the way back to the last weekend of the 1949 season before you collide with a Yankees-Red Sox situation that parallels the one we’re about to face. You have to go back 55 years before you get to a Yankees-Red Sox series with money on the table in which the Red Sox had equal footing.

“That season still kills me, it really does,” Johnny Pesky said a few months ago, sitting on a bench at the Red Sox spring training facility in Fort Myers, Fla., the memory still as fresh and as raw as it was on the first weekend of October 1949.

“There’s never going to be a man who tells me that we didn’t have the better team that year. There’s never going to be a man who tells me that if we didn’t get in the World Series that year, I would have a ring on this finger.”

The Red Sox weren’t only better that year, they had a one-game lead going into the final weekend. They had a manager, Joe McCarthy, who was hired precisely because he’d won seven championships with the Yankees in the ’30s and early ’40s.

The Red Sox had Ted Williams and Bobby Doerr and Dominic DiMaggio in their prime. They had Mel Parnell and Ellis Kinder anchoring their rotation, winning 48 games between them.

The Yankees? They had an injured Joe DiMaggio, overcoming pneumonia.

They had Casey Stengel in his first year, a development that had caused one Boston writer to muse, upon Stengel’s hiring, “The Yankees have officially been eliminated from the American League pennant.”

They needed to win once in those final two games.

They couldn’t win once. The Yankees swept. They beat the Dodgers in five. And they haven’t been this close since. Fifty-five years is enough.

“We had the better team,” Pesky said, “but the better team doesn’t always win.”

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Same time, different year

The Yankees and Red Sox have faced each other five times in late-season showdowns, with the Yankees coming up on the right side every time. Here’s a closer look:

2003 ALCS

Yankees 4, Red Sox 3

1999 ALCS

Yankees 4, Red Sox 1

Oct. 2, 1978 one-game playoff

Yankees 5, Red Sox 4

Oct. 1, 1949

Yankees 5, Red Sox 4

Oct. 2, 1949

Yankees 5, Red Sox 3