NEW YORK — Three solo walks defined Gerrit Cole’s evening.

The first came around 6:20 p.m. The Yankees ace, in full uniform, trudged to the home bullpen to warm up for his start. As he walked across the checkerboard-patterned field grass, a soft cheer went up from a group of early-arriving fans along the right field line. It was Cole’s first home appearance since a game against the Red Sox on September 14, in which he became the talk of baseball when he intentionally walked Rafael Devers with the bases empty. Some Yankees fans chased him off the mound that afternoon.

A few hours later, around 9:15 p.m., Cole took a much shorter walk, still technically alone, from the mound to the dugout. The reigning AL Cy Young winner had just dismantled the Orioles’ lineup over 6 2/3 scoreless innings. His Yankees, needing a win to reach the AL East, led 7-0 and went on to win 10-1. An appreciative, raucous crowd at Yankee Stadium stood and cheered. Cole tipped his cap, high-fived his way through a tunnel of pinstripes and descended into the clubhouse.

Around 10:20 p.m., Cole returned in the same vein.

Dressed in a navy blue “WE OWN THE EAST” T-shirt soaked in sparkling wine, the $324 million man hurried up the stairs and onto the field. Most of his teammates waited in center field, eagerly preparing for a team photo. Some, including team captain and AL MVP favorite Aaron Judge, carried gold bottles. Cole, eyes bloodshot and bloodshot from the celebratory geysers of alcohol, hurried across the diamond to join the party he had made possible.

The Yankees, like the first two and a half months of this season, waited for their ace.

“(Tonight) was really just a small taste of his genius,” Yankees skipper Aaron Boone said after the game.

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Cole, the club’s most reliable pitcher since signing with New York in December 2019, entered 2024 in a haze of uncertainty. During spring training, the 34-year-old felt a twinge of discomfort in his right elbow. Player and club, knowing that such pain is so often a precursor to Tommy John surgery, feared the worst. On March 13, the Yankees announced that Cole did not have a ligament tear but would be on the shelf for at least two more months to rest his ailing arm.

The team dodged the cannonball, but took some shrapnel with them. A significant stretch without the main pitcher loomed.

Cole didn’t throw from a mound until May 4. He didn’t make a Major League start until June 19 and didn’t throw a pitch in the sixth inning until July 12. Even after his somewhat miraculous return, there were still questions about his effectiveness. He had a 5.09 ERA after eight starts. But since August 10, he’s been vintage Cole, total brilliance with a 2.15 ERA over a stretch of nine starts, including a one-run gem in Oakland in his previous turn.

On Thursday, he wished the Yankees to a win and a division title. Facing Orioles CEO Corbin Burnes, the Yankees took an early 1-0 lead on a solo home run by Giancarlo Stanton. Burnes was otherwise sensational. But Cole was better: he reached 97 miles per hour and put zero after zero on the scoreboard. At one point, frustrated by a call from home plate umpire David Rackley, he stared daggers through him on his way to the dugout after the inning.

He looked nothing like the man who dodged danger against the Red Sox two weeks earlier.

“I thought we mixed really well,” Cole said after the match. “I thought Austin (Wells) was very sharp with our reads. We played great defense. G (Stanton) blasting them in the (second) gave us a little bit of a cushion to keep attacking.

Cole’s counterpart exited after the fifth, with the score 1-0 and the Orioles presumably hoping to keep Burnes well-rested for Game 1 of next week’s wild-card series. New York took advantage of the opportunity and exploded for a six-run sixth against Baltimore’s overmatched bullpen. Aaron Judge added a moonscraping blast in the seventh, his 58th of the season. He homered in five straight games.

Boone admitted in his post-game press conference that he didn’t even realize the streak. That’s the boring brilliance of the game’s best hitter.

Overall, it was a performance that represented the best version of the 2024 Yankees: shutdown pitching and a power-oriented, star-studded offense capable of overwhelming an opponent’s lesser relievers.

The Yankees could very well be facing this same Orioles team next month, one that many prognosticators have picked to win the division, when the games really matter. There’s no doubt that a summer swoon from a broken Baltimore team played a role in New York’s division title. But when the Orioles tumbled off a cliff in August, the Yankees held on. Getting through the bumps to win the AL East, given the magnitude of expectations surrounding this team, is its own achievement.

Winning in The Bronx is in some ways a higher level, a more difficult task. Every little blunder becomes a headline in YankeeWorld. That means the stakes are higher, the highs higher, the lows lower. Control is ubiquitous, just like the permanent hum of noise that blankets this city. Boone, who has been at the helm since 2018, understands that dynamic. That includes Judge and Cole.

That’s why they signed up to play here. Pressure makes diamonds, as they say, and no one has more of both than the New York Yankees. In this city, it’s always World Series or bust — an unfair edict, given the ever-increasing arbitrariness of the postseason baseball tournament. But that’s the reality here: The true measure of any Yankees season is what happens when the weather gets colder.

It was muggy on Thursday, but Gerrit Cole seemed ready for the cold.

“It was a special evening,” he said after the match. “This is what you want as a player. The division is yours for the taking.

“You have to go out and get it.”