By Wallace Matthews

Newsday

NEW YORK — One game does not a season make, or even a season series, but if ever one victory felt as if it could cancel out eight losses, Thursday night’s Yankees blowout of the Red Sox was that game.

But that is what eight runs in one inning will do for a ballclub, 34 minutes of nonstop offensive assault that made you forget all about the 32 hours of miserably one-sided baseball these two teams already had played this season.

So what if it came at the expense of John Smoltz, who looked older than Muhammad Ali out there, or that Joba Chamberlain barely made it through five innings and did his best to give back a six-run lead, or that for the first time in months, the new ballpark made Fenway look like a pitcher’s park, with six home runs of varying legitimacy leaving the cozy confines?

The only thing that matters is the final score, 13-6, and the fact that for the first time all season it was the Yankees beating the Red Sox. This is huge, if only because its futility against Boston remained the one thing that kept you from truly believing in this Yankee team. This one may not have evened the series, but it many ways, it went a long way to evening the score.

Now we can end the silliness about the first eight meetings between these two teams, all eight of which were won by Boston, as if the head-to-head battle between the two teams somehow superseded the AL East standings. Now, the preliminaries are over. The AL East race is on.

“I haven’t heard any of our guys talk about it,” Joe Girardi said of his team’s 0-8 stigma before the game. “We’ve stayed pretty much focused on the right games, the games we’ve been playing.”

He meant the 13 wins in 15 games they posted from late June into early July and the eight straight they won coming out of the All-Star break. He meant the blossoming of Chamberlain into a solid No. 3 starter – even if he looked at times like a No. 5 Thursday night – and the solidifying of the Yankees lineup into something to be feared.

And anyway, even though the Red Sox won the first eight battles the Yankees were winning the war, leading the division by 2 ½ games going into the game, 3 ½ games coming out. It reminded you just how ridiculous, and meaningless, it is to judge teams solely by how they play against one another.

It also reminded you of how these teams have flip-flopped roles since they last met, on June 11, which was, naturally, a Red Sox win. But since then, the Yankees have surged, going 31-16, and the Red Sox have flattened out, just 26-20, resulting in a 5 ½-game swing in the standings.

Clearly, nobody is walking off with the AL East, even if Chamberlain did try to walk the ballpark Thursday night, and the Red Sox were never going to win all 18 of their regular-season meetings against the Yankees, anyway. And it doesn’t change the essential truth of this season, which is that the only Yankees-Red Sox games that are really going to matter are the ones to be played in October, in the ALCS, provided both of them get that far.

And even if the Yankees can’t count on hitting against Smoltz every night, or even again this weekend, it has got to be encouraging to know that they don’t have to wait for the return of Mike Mussina in order to remember how to beat Boston.

They were reminded Thursday night they can do it without luring a 40-year-old out of retirement, or re-signing Aaron Boone, or conjuring up the spirit of Grady Little. They could do it with the guys in their clubhouse, and they could do it big.

It was only one game, but a game that felt very much like a new beginning to a season that is already two-thirds old.

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