NEW YORK – It was right there for them, as Aaron Boone likes to say, a chance for the 2024 New York Yankees to write a new page in the stale annals of baseball history. Never before had a team rallied to win the World Series after losing its first three games. In the early innings on Wednesday, the Yankees had reason to believe.

And then it was over, the season collapsing in an eerie fifth inning with blunders that will rank among the costliest in the 120 editions of baseball’s premier event. These Yankees made history, but not in the way they wanted. They are the only team to maintain a five-point lead while being eliminated from the World Series.

“We all know this is something we’re going to think about for a long time,” said Yankees reliever Tommy Kahnle, the losing pitcher in the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 7-6 win in Game 5 on Wednesday. “There’s nothing we can do about it now, but it will be hard to keep it in the back of our minds.”

The loss was Kahnle’s, but the crucial inning was a group effort scarier than anything you’ll see this Halloween. After four innings, the Yankees led 5-0 and the Dodgers were hitless off Gerrit Cole. After a single, Aaron Judge dropped a line drive into center field. Then Anthony Volpe fielded a grounder at short range and failed on his throw to third base for a force.

With the bases loaded, Cole rallied for two strikeouts. Then came something that always causes trouble: first, a little roller-up by a guy named Mookie in a World Series game in New York.

In 1986, Mookie Wilson’s dribbler slipped under Bill Buckner’s glove and the Mets vaulted the Boston Red Sox in a miraculous Game 6 comeback. However, we will never know whether Buckner or pitcher Bob Stanley could have knocked Wilson down.

This time we know: Mookie beat it – Betts that is – and if the Yankees had simply made the play, the inning would have ended 5-0. Instead, the game was tied at the end of the inning and by midnight the season was over.

“If you give a team like the Dodgers a few extra outs, they’re going to take advantage of that,” Judge said. “But it comes back to me. I have to make that game, and the other two probably won’t happen.

The Dodgers won a pennant once, in the 1978 NLCS final, with a rally that led to a drop fly by a Gold Glove center fielder, Garry Maddox of the Philadelphia Phillies. Judge didn’t win a Gold Glove, but he had just made a leaping catch on the wall to rob Freddie Freeman in the fourth and hadn’t made an error all season.

The judge could not explain what had happened. Did the ball bounce on him?

“I just didn’t make the play,” he said.

Will Smith followed with a grounder to the right of Volpe, the shortstop, who bounced his throw to third base. As Kiké Hernández pressed the bag, the ball clattered off Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s glove.

“I thought that was my only action and just pulled the throw,” Volpe said, but Freeman had a different point of view.

“I know they fouled Volpe on that play,” Freeman said, “but if you slow down and you see Kiké running to third base, that’s what caused that play; he has an incredible base IQ.”

Still, after the two strikeouts that followed, the Yankees would have survived these mistakes if not for the confusing spin on a slow grounder that wouldn’t even exceed the highway speed limit. It was the toughest 49.8 mph dribbler the Yankees had ever seen.

The @Dodgers get on the board in game 5. #WorldSeries pic.twitter.com/Mif4HgFsoO

— MLB (@MLB) October 31, 2024

“I took a bad angle to the ball,” Cole said. “I wasn’t really sure how hard he hit. I made a direct angle at it, as if to cut it off, because I just didn’t know how hard he was hitting it. And by the time the ball got to me, I wasn’t in a position to cover first. Neither of us were, based on the spin of the baseball and the fact that he had to make it safe. Just a bad read.”

He added: “I think my corner should be a little more aggressive towards first base to give myself a chance to get through the bag if I don’t get the ball. But I just couldn’t read the ball well.”

Rizzo, meanwhile, said he had to stay on the ball because of the way it was spinning. Such grounders, he said, are the hardest for a first baseman to handle. But miscommunication played a role.

“I mean, pitchers are always taught to get over it, no matter what,” Rizzo said. “It was just a weird, spinning game that I definitely had to get. I think even if I had gotten through that to get to first place, I don’t know if I would have gotten it. Balls off the bat like a right-hander’s, and they’re spinning – I went one way and then the ball kicked the other way. You just have to follow it all the way in because you don’t know what that ball is going to do.

What it did was ruin everything. Because Freeman, in the back of the count, hit a two-run single to center, and Teoscar Hernández hit a two-run, game-tying double. The Yankees had an expected winning percentage of 92.6 percent before Betts’ at-bat. With the lead gone, the odds were almost even – and the Dodgers were on their way.

There’s no shame in losing to a superior team, and the Dodgers had the best record in baseball. But, someone asked Chisholm, weren’t the mistakes surprising?

“I’m a professional baseball player and I’ve made mistakes myself, so I can tell you it’s not that surprising,” he said. “But I mean, it’s baseball. Sometimes you just blinked and everything was gone.”

The season was over for the Yankees in one fell swoop. With a 5-0 lead and their top performance, they should have ended the evening with a new itinerary for a flight to Los Angeles. That in itself would have been a first: No team that lost the first three games of a World Series had ever made it to Game 6.

But the Yankees were like a sleek sports car that never did anything about that pesky engine light. The warnings were always there – sloppy fielding, baffling base running, fundamental errors – but the ride was so much fun that the Yankees hoped they could still reach their destination. It was strangely fitting to fail this way.

It was only the seventh game in World Series history in which a team lost after leading by five or more runs. However, in all other cases the losing team had more games to play. These Yankees are done.

“This is as bad as it gets,” Cole said. “It’s the worst feeling you have. Sometimes you have to be willing to believe yourself, to give yourself a chance. We kept pushing and pushing and eventually we came up short. It’s cruel.”

Betts’ grounder, and the damage it caused, will now be cited whenever a pitcher fails to cover first base. The fact that it was only Game 5 will take away some of the sting historically. But considering how close the Yankees came to a Game 6 – which would have put so much pressure on the Dodgers – the Cole/Rizzo play and the mistakes that preceded it belong on the list of memorable Fall Classic miscues.

Brooklyn Dodgers catcher Mickey Owen’s third strike in the ninth inning of Game 4 of the 1941 World Series ultimately cost his team a game-tying victory over the Yankees. (Getty Images)

Fred Snodgrass’ drop ball in 1912. Mickey Owen’s third strike in 1941. Don Denkinger’s failed call in 1985. Buckner’s error in 1986. Mariano Rivera’s wild throw on a bunt in 2001. The fateful fifth collection in 2024.

Reasonable. But also remember that Cole plowed through that inning and pitched into the seventh. And that the Yankees scraped together a go-ahead run in the sixth, only to lose the lead for good in the eighth. And that no team in 54 years had won even once after losing the first three games of a World Series.

“We fought,” Rizzo said. ‘There is absolutely no one here who should hang his head. It’s hard to win. It is difficult to climb to the top of the mountain. And we were close.”

Close enough to look across the continent at a World Series conclusion that will never come.

(Top photo of Jazz Chisholm and Kiké Hernández: Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)