Now what?

Oh, don’t give me that look.

You know you were thinking the same thing Sunday night, even as you swigged champagne or beer (anything but Coors) and enjoyed a post-championship celebration that felt precisely nothing like the pure exultation and disbelief of three years and one day earlier.

Tom Werner summarized it succinctly and superbly.

The 2004 title representing the death of Dan Shaughnessy’s retirement scheme — um, I mean, The Alleged Curse Of That Fat Guy We Traded To That Other Team — was for our loved one watching from heaven or resting comfortably in that urn above the fireplace. Whatever your faith affords.

This one was for us. The ubiquitous “we” whose role Jerry Seinfeld so eloquently ridiculed in one of his comedic bits. “They won. We watched.”

Well, we/they/us now stand alone as the only Major League franchise to win multiple championships in this decade, and with that great power comes someone else’s great responsibility to make sure we/they/us keep winning.

In the space of little more than a thousand days, we’ve evolved from a region of Charlie Browns waiting for the line drive to fly back through the box and whisk our clothes off to a cult of insufferable frontrunners.

Everything we’ve long loathed about those smug Yankee yahoos and their gleeful support of professional sports’ answer to Wal-Mart, we’re not merely becoming. We’re there, dudes.

No additional proof was needed than our reaction to Scott Boras and Alex Rodriguez’s attempted theft of the Game 4 thunder with their invocation of that infamous opt-out clause during the seventh-inning stretch.

The right response was to laugh it off as an attempt by baseball’s answer to Terrell Owens and Kobe Bryant to satisfy his desperate need for attention. Instead, we lost our mind. Our resident professor emeritus, Peter Gammons, allowed the episode to give him a dangerous, 24-hour blood pressure spike.

Stop fighting this battle, people.

Yankee Universe (has anyone but Hank Steinbrenner ever used that term, by the way?) made it abundantly clear that their 26-0 advantage in world championships from 1919 to 2003 negated their relationship with the red-headed stepchild from Massachusetts as a rivalry.

For the sake of its sanity, Red Sox Nation must now take the same approach and recognize the desperate, mismanaged team inhabiting the Bronx as the yellowing newspaper protecting the bottom of a parakeet’s cage. Yesterday’s news.

We/they/us must view the Yankees the way bleeding hearts and tree worshippers view Ronald Reagan: As a failed experiment in capitalism.

We they/us need to let the Chicago Cubs or Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim By Way of Westwood Presented By The Home Depot overpay for Mr. GQ and his lifetime .089 postseason slugging percentage.

We/they/us need to shell out whatever it takes for the next four years to lock up Mike Lowell, a consummate professional who has at least that much fuel lingering in his tank.

We/they/us need to begin thinking ahead and deciding how to handle left field when Manny Ramirez’s contract expires and is no longer an albatross around our throat. As in, is Jacoby Ellsbury our future center fielder or left fielder?

We/they/us need to resist the temptation to be nostalgic about Curt Schilling. We/they/us also need to give him a lifetime pass, classily thank him for his priceless service and not fight back when he inevitably tries to blog a war of words on his way of town.

We/they/us need to stay the course with a brilliant young rotation of Josh Beckett, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz with an assist to Tim Wakefield, while letting somebody else bid on the weakest free-agent market in recent memory.

Along the way, we/they/us also need to answer the hard question for good about whether Jonathan Papelbon is part of that Fab Five or a Hall of Fame closer, and to spend appropriately given the consequences of that decision.

We/they/us need to not give up on J.D. Drew or Julio Lugo after one season or normal highs and lows, as we/they/us abandoned the Edgar Renteria experiment.

Perhaps most importantly, we/they/us need to tender Terry Francona a serious contract extension with a raise that reflects what he is: One of the top five managers in the game.

Being winners is a year-round job and a way of life, and the Red Sox — whatever pronoun you use to describe them — have the pieces in place to be not just the Team of This Decade, but the next one too.

That’s what.