“It is a hopeless existence,” she was saying.

The rain had just begun to soak the infield dirt at Yankee Stadium before a weekend of rivalry, and, standing on a soggy stretch of Seventh Avenue sidewalk, Kate O’Brien, a freckly, wide-eyed pre-school teacher from Providence, R.I., wearing her Boston cap and Boston jersey, was boasting on and on about the time for revenge, almost a century’s worth of revenge.

She was standing outside the Riviera Cafe, the turncoat waterhole that’s located in Greenwich Village but is better known around New England as that one place among New York’s thousands of saloons, taverns, and martini bars that serves Red Sox fans – and Red Sox fans only.

Here the beleaguered faithful of the snake-bitten Sox are free to booze and curse A-Rod’s salary and the Yank’s we-can-buy-the-best-baseball attitude among themselves, then weep and mourn together as if in group therapy at their own team’s miraculous ability for self-defeat.

The rumors and legends, only two years in the making, is that the bar is owned by a hyper-superstitious Sox fan from Boston with baked beans baked into his blood and would never dare allow any Yankee to play on his flat screens unless, of course, it’s against his Sox.

While those rumors are far from true, and the bar is actually owned by a group of investors from New York, manager Steve Sertell said that Sox fans are a loyal tribe that started coming five years ago when owners purchased a satellite television deal that allowed them to show Sox games and all other kinds of unusual sports.

Red Sox Nation kept coming, and coming. Now there is no room for anyone any more. It was only the first inning on Friday night and the bar had reached it’s over 140 indoor capacity. Ms. O’Brien and a pack of her early 20-something friends, and about two dozen others, were stubbornly standing in the rain and exhibiting their Boston solidarity by watching the herky-jerky windup of Yankee pitcher Orlando Hernandez through the bar’s foggy, beaded-up window panes.

“Typical,” said Ms. O’Brien, 23. “But only Red Sox fans are willing to do this, you know? Yankees fans, they don’t like getting wet.”

Pinstripes enthusiasts are actually allowed inside the Riviera (when there is room), but that doesn’t mean they are welcome. “Go home,” one Sox fan barked at my Yankees cap.

“Take that[$#$@!]hat off!,” said another.” I said, Take that [$#$@] hat off!”

Then came the ubiquitous, but hardly creative, chide, “Yankees suck.”

Some stares were drunk and cold. Others were downright menacing.

“You serious, bro?” said Kenneth Christian, a red-faced stockbroker from New Jersey who justified his lifelong allegiance to Boston by some sort of “underdog” status. “Listen, there’s tons of other bars in New York, so why don’t you just leave right now and give us a little peace and quiet, okay?”

Peace and quiet, however, are not to be found here. Loyalists wear jerseys embossed with the names “Ramirez” and “Martinez” and “Gay-Rod,” and erupt in a slurry haze of banshee cheers, howling cat calls, and spontaneous whoops.

The tension is building. Again.

In June, the Sox were 10 games behind the Yankees. Now it’s a dogfight for the East Coast pennant, and Sox centerfielder Johnny Damon’s caveman-like mane and castaway beard never looked so sexy, Sox fan Marisa Giorgi, 24, remarked in the Riviera. She added that the hygienic, clean-shaven Yanks never before seemed so poised and ripe to become picture-perfect victims of their own corporate, calculating greed.

“How can you people live with yourselves?” said Colin Smith, 25, a Bank of America employee, his fingers and mouth painted hot-sauce orange from inhaling Riviera chicken wings. “Being a Yankee fan is like rootin’ for the House when you’re playing black jack,” he groaned. “It’s like rootin’ for Wal-Mart over mom and pop stores. I mean, how could you root for Wal-Mart?”

“You people,” he added, “are sick[$#$@!]people.”

A quick baseball primer: For those who may have overlooked the box scores over the last eight decades, the rivalry between the oh-so-triumphant Yankees and the come-so-close Red Sox is as epic a grudge match as any in sports.

The player’s tussle and spar on the field every year. Punches are thrown. Overweight coaches are thrown to the ground. Couples that carry mixed allegiances try to stay together. They try.

Everyone knows when it started: 1920. And everyone knows how it happened. Sox owner Harry Frazee traded a lefty pitcher and big swing talent named George Herman Ruth to the Yanks for $100,000 and a loan to finish building Fenway Park. The Sox have not won a World Series since. End of story.

Ask Ms. O’Brien what separates Sox fans from all others, and her answer is simple and bitter. “History,” she said.

When the Yankees’ 26 world championship were raised as equally historical, she said, “Yeah, but that’s bad history, a history of cheating, lying, and stealing.”

The trade of Ruth, of course, is tiredly known as the Curse of the Bambino, a ghostly hex that comes down from above. How else to explain Bill Buckner, Bucky Dent, and Aaron Boone?

In the Riviera, the Curse does not exist (at least publicly.) Sox fans do not call the Curse the Curse here, but prefer to shrug off the team’s perennial bloopers and roster chock full of choke artists as simply, “a little bad luck.”

That doesn’t mean Sox fans always lose. The existence of the Riviera itself is a moral victory, Sox fans bragged, because when any New Yorker comes to Boston and looks for unity when watching a game the only place to do so is behind closed doors.

“There ain’t no Yankee bars in Boston, that’s for sure,” said Lee Wali, a Boston tax attorney. “Look at us now. Here we are. Right in the lion’s den.”

Solidarity, faith, and bottles and bottles of Samuel Adams beer all seemed to churn and mix together towards the top of the ninth inning when the once unhittable Mariano Rivera was hit, and the Sox stole the game 3-2 and the yearlong series, 9-5. Then, when everything seemed so right for Boston, everything went so wrong. Again. The Yanks trounced the Sox on Saturday afternoon, 14-4, and Sunday was more of the same, 11-1. And like so many times before, the ride back to Boston from the bar stools at the Riviera and the parking lots at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx seemed longer, so much longer, than before.

“It is a hopeless existence,” Ms. O’Brien was saying, “but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”