The one thing the Yankees never did when they were winning World Series is give games away in October; it simply didn’t happen. When they lost they lost honestly, because the other team was better or because the Yankees failed to play up to their own capabilities.

Last night, the Yankees gave up a grand slam’s worth of runs on bad defensive play. Of the five runs charged to starter Mike Mussina, one came on a home run, one came on a ball that Bubba Crosby dropped when colliding with Gary Sheffield, two more came as a result of catchable pop flies falling in, and the last came when Jason Giambi proved unable to peg a runner at home on a grounder to the right side These things happen; it would be too much to say that none of those runs should have scored.

It wasn’t just the defense, though The team lost chances to score when Bernie Williams missed a hit-and-run sign in the second, leaving Robinson Cano to get pegged at first, and when the entire team decided to start swinging for the fences once it found itself in a three-run hole. Combined with the defensive miscues, last night you had the picture of a team that relied too heavily for too long on sheer firepower and couldn’t win the subtler sort of game at which the team once excelled when it counted.

Three years ago, the Angels, on their way to a victory in the World Series made the Yankees look every bit as old and ham-fisted as they did last night, by the exact same methods: Their contact hitters sprayed balls all over the field challenging a slow and aging group of defenders to catch them. If one had been told after that series that three years lat er the Yankees would be defeated the same way for the same reasons by much the same players, it would have been hard to believe; but so it was.

There isn’t much more to say about this team, not quite a failure (no team that wins 95 games and the division is a failure) and yet certainly not a success. Like a politician claiming that deficits don’t matter, the Yankees for years not only ignored the fundamental flaws of their team – poor defense, shaky starting pitching, nonexistent middle relief, and something of an over-reliance on power at the expense of contact hitting – but claimed them as a virtue. Any team that acquires a Gold Glove shortstop and then shifts him to another position in deference to a weaker incumbent is inviting disaster.

Like our politician, the Yankees de layed and delayed in solving their problems, hoping either that they would solve themselves or that they would prove not to be problems at all. Rather than relieving the inevitable pain, this only compounded it.

At this point, and granting that last year’s failure to win the pennant was the result of a historically unprecedented comeback that saw as much luck smile on the Red Sox as has ever smiled on a team, it’s worth wondering if the Yankees as presently configured haven’t become something like the Braves, a perennial division champion doomed by some inscrutable flaw never to win a world championship. Up until now, Yankee triumph in October has been the normal state of affairs, the default setting; that’s clearly no longer true.

But despite the fact that all the same flaws written about in this space and elsewhere finally came back to haunt the team, this is a year Yankees fans will eventually remember with a special fondness. More than the inability to win it all, this team has become dislikable in recent years because of its lack of a clear and coherent personality, and because its status as uncrowned champion has made its successes seem inevitable, meaning few could really savor them. That wasn’t the case this year. It would take a hard-hearted fan to root against Shawn Chacon, Aaron Small, or Robinson Cano, or even Jason Giambi; and if there was no small bit of cheer, even for staunch partisans, in seeing highly-paid mercenary Randy Johnson’s various failures in the early part of the year, there was also the undeniable pleasure of seeing Alex Rodriguez, one of the truly great players in the history of the game, having the sort of season everyone expected from him when he arrived in New York amid much fanfare.

There will be much to do this fall and winter; it is quite possible that both manager Joe Torre and general manager Brian Cashman will be replaced, and even that the murky, Tampa-based bureaucrats who have a heavy hand in running the team will feel some pain. Favorites will be gone, and the team will take on an entirely new character, one which may not make itself felt in full until 2007. If all this comes to pass, it will be three years too late.

tmarchman@nysun.com