CLEVELAND – Yankees players, as disappointed as they were, could on some level appreciate what they were a part of.

“Two good teams going after it,” Aaron Judge said late Thursday night after the Yankees’ 7-5 loss in 10 innings to the Guardians in Game 3 of the American League Championship Series, a game that featured four home runs – two for each team – from the eighth inning, David Fry’s final walk-off two-run homer off Clay Holmes. “Just great at bat after great at bat. They were able to get away with the last big swing there.”

Anthony Rizzo had the most unusual perspective of anyone when it came to that kind of late-inning madness.

As he put it with a weary smile, “I was right on that field, I think in the eighth inning, when they tied the game with a big home run. Luckily it wasn’t Game 7.”

Indeed, Rizzo was the Cubs’ first baseman in 2016 when they won a classic Game 7 of the World Series at Progressive Field, beating Cleveland 8-7 in 10 innings.

The Cubs, playing in the World Series for the first time since 1945 and trying to win their first championship since 1908, built a 5-1 lead in the fifth inning that unseasonably warm evening in Cleveland and held a 6-3 lead with four out. to go before everything broke loose in the eighth.

With a runner on, two outs and the Cubs leading 6-4, Rajai Davis choked on the bat and put a 2-and-2, 97-mph fastball from Aroldis Chapman just over the railing atop the 20-foot wall in left field to tie the score at 6 and shake the stadium.

Just as Progressive Field shook in the ninth inning on Thursday night when pinch hitter Jhonkensy Noel hit a two-out, two-run homer off previously undefeated Luke Weaver, tying the score at 5-5. That explosion out of nowhere was preceded in the top of the eighth by Judge’s ballpark-silencing two-run homer off Emmanuel Clase to make it 3-3, which was immediately followed by a Giancarlo Stanton home run that tied the score. the Yankees a 4-3 lead. Clase, who posted a 0.61 ERA this season and has a cutter that often reaches 98 to 101 mph, had allowed exactly two home runs in the regular season.

In one of those great coincidences that often occur in this sport, Davis, who retired after playing the 2019 season with the Mets and who is now Major League Baseball’s senior director of on-field operations, was there Thursday night.

“That’s way up there. That’s one of my all-time favorites,” Davis, who played 14 seasons in the Majors, said Friday of Thursday night’s game rankings for him of the games he’s played in or witnessed. (Of course, and rightly so, 2016’s Game 7 will probably never be displaced from the top spot.)

Davis said he felt “shivers” running the bases after his Game 7 homer and felt something similar Thursday, more so after Noel’s home run because it ranked higher on the shock scale than Fry’s.

“I definitely felt it. I felt some chills,” Davis said. “I felt the immensity of the situation, like this is a big moment. I felt that and I felt that this is a home run of great magnitude.

No one at the Yankees would dispute that. And while no one wearing the street gray certainly got chills seeing Noel’s home run or Fry’s, they knew they had played a game that would be talked about for some time.

“Look, a great game to watch,” said Aaron Boone, whose 11th-inning home run off Tim Wakefield at old Yankee Stadium ended a classic Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS. “That was play- offbaseball. Both sides kept coming with haymakers and big at-bats, big moments with two really good bullpens. They survived us. They had one more good swing than we did.”

Rizzo said, “That’s a great baseball game if you’re a fan of both sides and just a fan of the game. It’s hard to be on this side.”

Notes & quotes: Ian Hamilton was taken off the Yankees’ ALCS roster Friday afternoon due to the right calf injury he suffered in Game 3 and was replaced by fellow reliever Mark Leiter Jr. In accordance with MLB rules when it comes to postseason injuries, Hamilton will not. be eligible for the World Series if the Yankees get there. Before Friday’s race, Boone said Hamilton was nursing a Grade 1 calf injury. . Austin Wells, 2-for-26 with 12 strikeouts this postseason entering Friday – including 0-for-10 in the ALCS – was scratched from mop-up action to the eighth Friday. He was replaced in cleanup by Jazz Chisholm Jr., who went 4-for-27 in the first seven games of the postseason.