There’s no truth to the rumor that the Yankees will arrive here tomorrow to the sound of taps.

But there should be.

Because this race is already over.

Finis.

Kaput.

Done.

Over.

Use any expression you want.

Because they’re all appropriate.

The Yankees are as gone as April.

At least as far as the American League East is concerned.

Write it down.

Red Smith, one of the best sports writers of all time, once said that sports writers shouldn’t make predictions. He was right. Predictions invariably come back to bite you, make you look like a fool. Predictions are a minefield every sports writer should fear to tread.

So call this a walk on the wild side.

And I don’t say this with any glee, understand. The Red Sox and the Yankees are the best rivalry in the game, one that always comes to us wrapped in history and memory, in white-hot intensity, so there’s nothing any better in baseball than both of them in a pennant race. To the point that any year in which one of them is out of it early is simply not as good.

Like now.

A weekend series that should be something to look forward to, but instead this one comes at us with all the suspense wrung out of it.

And it has little to do with the great start the Sox are off to. History tells us that great starts can run out of the money, like some sprint horse that fades in the backstretch. History tells us that baseball is a long season.

Case in point: 1978.

This is the Yankee fans’ new mantra: remember ’78, the year the Sox were 14 games up on the Yanks in mid-July, the season that culminated in the infamous playoff game at Fenway in which banjo-hitting Bucky Dent hit his home run, one of the signature horrors in Red Sox history.

But this does not look like 1978, for the simple reason that this Yankees team is not that one.

That’s what this comes down to, the sense that this Yankees team is flawed in too many ways — no backup catcher, no bench, a shaky bullpen and too many starting pitchers who don’t go far enough into games.

And then there’s the lineup.

This is the lineup that was supposed to bring fear and loathing to everyone else in the American League?

This is the lineup that supposedly would more than compensate for the questionable pitching?

Oh, really.

Not yet, anyway.

But it’s more than that.

It’s the increasing sense that this Yankee team is a baseball version of Dead Man Walking. New York is a great place to play when you are winning. When you are not, it’s Baseball Hell, every day another beating on the back page of the tabloids, every day another beating on WFAN, every day another symbolic slap upside the head.

Yesterday?

Yesterday was just the latest example.

Yesterday there was A-Rod, pictured with a woman who does not look anything like his wife, in a Toronto hotel, splashed across the front page of the New York Post, complete with a big, bold headline that screamed out, STRAY-ROD.

By itself, this is no big deal, unless you are Mr. and Mrs. A-Rod, of course. By itself, this would be just another day on the front page of The Post, where celebrities caught in the crosshairs of scandal are fair game.

This comes, however, on the heels of the team meeting the Yankees had had the night before, Joe Torre and the troops, one of those get-togethers designed to right the listless ship, not just be a prelude to a loss to the Blue Jays.

This also followed Boss Steinbrenner’s edict that this is all on general manager Brian Cashman’s head, the latest employee to have his neck in a noose, as if all the problems can now disappear in a wisp of smoke if the Boss just stomps his foot and yells loud enough.

Does any team need this? You tell me.

All of this is in the context of a team that’s been south of .500 for the first two months.

Forget the Red Sox.

This is a team fighting with Tampa Bay to stay out of the American League East basement.

This is a team poised to make a run at the Red Sox?

Only in pinstripe dreams.

For that’s the other thing this Yankees team faces now, this need to win every game, the sense that this is all unraveling, piece by piece, a team whose flaws have become all but outlined in neon.

This, too, is what happens in New York when things aren’t going well, the incessant media scrutiny, the sense of failure that now lives right there in the Yankees’ clubhouse, right there with the balls and bats and pinstripes hanging in the lockers, the sense that if they can’t get back into this season it will be a failure of Ruthian proportions. All the little realities that now hover over this team like a lead weight.

This is a team that’s going to come back and get back in this race?

Don’t bet on it.

And I know stranger things have happened. And I know that it’s never over till it’s over, as Yogi used to say.

But this isn’t 1978.

This is now.

And this is over.

And the Yankees?

Welcome to the wild-card chase.

breynold@projo.com