I’m wondering how many World Series trophies and duck boat parades Boston Red Sox loyalists need to see before we get over the lifelong inferiority complex that is our birthright.

Based on unscientific observation of the past four months, it’s safe to say the answer is greater than four.

On a related note, another great mystery is how many epic playoff comebacks we have to witness – in all of pro sports, and not merely those that positively or negatively impact our favorite teams – before we recognize that almost all aspects of the regular season are meaningless.

Guilty as charged, here. At this writing from the easy chair on a sweltering Sunday afternoon, I’m torn between wanting to gloat about Thursday through Saturday’s results at Fenway Park and the borderline insane belief that I could somehow jinx the result of a Sunday night game that may or may not have been complete at press time.

Such is life for a Sox fan. We tend to accentuate negative past performance and still view recent, positive data as an aberration, even when there is a mountain of it in our corner.

Boston’s three-game massacre-in-progress of New York (38 runs scored, 13 given up) shot the Sox to a record of 59-47 and trimmed their daunting deficit of 11 games in the American League East to a you-never-know disparity of eight.

For those who aren’t keeping score at home, that’s one game better than Boston’s pace, and one game closer to the top spot in the division, than where the Sox stood at this mile post in 2004.

Surely you remember 2004. Stolen base, bloody sock, lead-off hitter who looked like Jesus, hall of fame pitcher getting over his daddy issues. A good time was had by most.

It was easy to be skeptical then. Boston’s then-mannish boy general manager, Theo Epstein, traded away the face of the franchise, Sports Illustrated cover model Nomar Garciaparra, at the deadline. Nobody could rightly tell if the Sox fancied themselves buyers or sellers in the midsummer market when the two primary additions, Orlando Cabrera and Doug Mientkiewicz, were journeymen at best.

The watershed moment came a week earlier, of course, when Jason Varitek famously told Alex Rodriguez that Bronson Arroyo didn’t bleeping throw at .260 hitters and reinforced the point with a stiff arm to the kisser.

Message sent. It was a brave new world. The Sox were well aware that you didn’t have to win the division to take home the ultimate prize in late October. They also showed a keen understanding, perhaps for the first time in our lives, that the psychological aspect of baseball may trump even the physical.

Those Yankees appeared unbeatable when they added Rodriguez and then Gary Sheffield to a lineup that already featured Derek Jeter, Hideki Matsui, Bernie Williams and a fading Jason Giambi.

That reconfiguration of murderer’s row, however had holes in its atmosphere; namely a pedestrian pitching staff and a collective skin that was thinner than the teams of the 1970s and the more ancient history that its fan base thinks still matters.

Boston had been built quietly, through the addition of Twitter firebrand Curt Schilling and slightly lower profile pickups such as manager Terry Francona, to exploit those weaknesses.

I’m not comparing this season’s journey stride-for-stride with the one from 15 summers and autumns ago. Simply saying that the Sox, not unlike the Patriots, have shown us there is more than one way to climb this mountain over the course of a long season.

Certainly it’s harder to shed the wild card label than it was back then. You have to survive the scary scenario of a one-game playoff, then beat the top seed in a best-of-five.

I like my chances of that with Chris Sale, David Price and Eduardo Rodriguez in my corner better than I would have with any combination of an injured Schilling, an aging Pedro Martinez and the unpredictable corner-painting of Arroyo and Derek Lowe.

The Yankees, yet again, are a rotisserie team with a knack for injuries, a questionable rotation, and the kind of all-or-nothing swings that get you beaten in the fall.

It also seems as if Alex Cora, like Francona before him, takes full advantage of having been in his players’ shoes more recently than most of his peers by pulling all the right strings.

Cora clearly had his finger on this team’s pulse from the get-go, recognizing that it was an erratic, labored heartbeat after an abbreviated, hectic off-season. That was hard for the natural skeptics in the audience to accept when the Sox started 3-9 and stayed under .500 until May 10 after last year’s 17-2 inferno out of the starting block.

That was a generational season, one comparable to some 1980s teams (Mets, A’s) that had the look of a dynasty but flamed out in a hurry. Every 162-game journey is necessarily different. True dynasties sometimes get accused of “flicking the switch,” when actually they’re just shifting into gear at the right time.

Cora didn’t panic when some of his stars, most notably Mookie Betts and Andrew Benintendi, performed below the level of their Strat-O-Matic cards in April and May. He, and they, have been rewarded with the customary summer surge.

He seems equally nonplussed by the great-field, no-hit tendencies of Jackie Bradley Jr., and the revolving door of roles and frequent failures in the Sox bullpen. Both reap the fan base’s chagrin, but then, Cora’s recognition that everything before October is extended spring training paid handsome dividends a year ago. I’m willing to gamble that it will again.

This franchise has earned patience and inspired confidence over the past decade-and-a-half. It’s OK to celebrate what transpired this weekend and anticipate the potential of the next 55-and-change games without waiting for the other cleat to drop.

Kalle Oakes spent 27 years in the Sun Journal sports department. He is now sports editor of the Georgetown (Kentucky) News-Graphic. Keep in touch with him by email at kaloakes1972@yahoo.com.

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