In 1967, Carl Yastrzemski, here being congratulated by teammate George Scott after hitting a home run, went on to become the league’s last triple-crown winner.

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John Lennon had once said that The Beatles were more popular than God. [In 1967,] the Red Sox were more popular than The Beatles!

—Rico Petrocelli, ex-Sox shortstop, in his book ‘Tales from The Impossible Dream Red Sox’

More popular than The Beatles. That’s about right.

As the years march by, it gets more and more difficult for those who were there to explain 1967 to those who weren’t. It was 40 years ago, after all, and it’s not that a lot has changed, baseball-wise, locally since then. It’s that everything has.

What’s hard to get across is that it was these guys — the 1967 Red Sox — who changed it.

The seeds of today’s nightly sellouts, insatiable fan interest and wall-to-wall media coverage were all planted 40 years ago when a bunch of babies — average age of the starting lineup: 24 — grabbed New England by the heart and never let go. But it’s like talking about the Depression to a generation raised in McMansions. How to put it in context?

More popular than The Beatles. That’s about right.

For the last 40 years, the Red Sox have been one of baseball’s glamour teams. They’ve had winning records in all but seven of those seasons, they’ve won four pennants, they finally nailed down that oh-so-elusive World Series championship, and have been involved, positively and negatively, in some of the sport’s signature moments over the last four decades (Carlton Fisk, Bucky Dent, Bill Buckner, coming back from an 0-3 deficit in the LCS). They live life in baseball’s fast lane, in other words. They’re an A-list franchise.

Hard as it is to believe if you’re not 45 or so, putting forth such a notion on Opening Day 1967 would have been . . . what? Ludicrous? Laughable? Absurd? Take your pick. Any of it fits.

As 1967 dawned, the Red Sox were coming off eight consecutive losing seasons. They’d lost 90-plus games for three straight years, including a 100-loss disgrace in 1965. They hadn’t won an American League pennant in 21 years, and hadn’t seriously contended for one in 15. After Ted Williams retired in 1960, attendance plummeted; the average attendance for a game at Fenway Park in the six years from 1961-66 was 10,026. Like the Bruins of today, they had become irrelevant. Their existence barely dented the Boston sports consciousness.

“You couldn’t give tickets away — no one wanted them,” Petrocelli wrote in his book.

To change all that in one year . . . well, why wouldn’t you become more popular than the Beatles?

The catalyst for the change was a 38-year-old drill sergeant, wearing a brush cut in an age of long-hairs. Dick Williams had finished his career with the Red Sox in ’63 and ’64, and was repulsed by both the players’ cavalier attitudes and management’s failure to impose any sense of discipline or accountability on the team. With the backing of new general manager Dick O’Connell, he set out to do nothing less than change the culture of the entire organization.

“I thought we had a good ballclub,” he remembered in a 1984 television interview. “We were short on pitching, but we had guys that could play .  . . A lot of them were going through the motions. We had good players that had never been organized before.”

His mission: Organize them.

Mission accomplished.

Now, at each milestone anniversary — and this season’s 40th means we’ll be hearing quite a bit about the ’67 Sox in the weeks and months ahead — the players re-gather to tell the stories. Old film clips are re-shown. Old memories are resurrected. Billy Rohr’s near no-hitter. Tony Conigliaro’s walkoff home run. Jose Tartabull’s catch and throw. The season-long dominance of Jim Lonborg. The brilliance of Carl Yastrzemski. But no single one of them flicked the switch and turned the Red Sox from punch lines to darlings. It was, instead, a combination of factors.

They were winning after years of losing.

They were young, with the promise of successes to come.

They were exciting. (With their penchant for come-from-behind wins, they were nicknamed “The Cardiac Kids”.)

They were involved in a thrilling, four-team pennant race.

And as each element built, affection for them grew. People in New England had always loved baseball, and were happy to have an interesting team to root for again. But this was different.

1967 was a tumultuous time in American history, a time of culture war between the generations. The Red Sox became a unifying force locally, appealing to the younger generation with their vitality and to the older one with their success in a game they loved. (That they did it the old-fashioned way — under the whip of a hard-nosed manager who made them toe the line — didn’t hurt, either.) Fenway Park was suddenly a place where a traditional father (or mother) and his/her hippie son (or daughter) could put aside their differences and come together. 1967 was the Summer of Love, but, thanks to the Red Sox, that phrase had a whole other meaning in New England.

When the last two victories over the Twins were in the books and the final weekend was complete, so was the transformation. No longer were they the Jersey Street Jesters, Tom Yawkey’s pets, or whatever other insulting label had been pasted upon them over the years. The Red Sox now were, as said the sign held up by the flower-power girl on Van Ness Street prior to the World Series, incredibly beautiful people.

More popular than The Beatles.

They’ve pretty much remained that way for the last 40 years, too.

If you weren’t there — and a lot of you weren’t — maybe that’s all you need to know as you try to understand why a team that only won 92 games and lost the World Series still has such a mystical grip on so many of us.

amartone@projo.com