We have become the Yankees.

We have become the team we always hated, the one with all the money and all the advantages, the big baseball bullies.

We have become the Yankees.

At least in this series with the Rays.

That’s the irony here.

It’s the Red Sox that are the team with the huge payroll, the Red Sox with the two World Series titles since 2004, the Red Sox with the huge fan base, the Red Sox, the team that always played to sold-out crowds, the Red Sox with one of the best brands in all of sports, the Red Sox that are the big dog in this fight.

The Rays? They’re the ’67 Red Sox.

They are the team that’s come out of nowhere, the team that went from last to first in the A.L. East this year, the team that plays in that ridiculous domed stadium in Tampa, the one where no one ever used to go to, a baseball Death Valley.

They are the team that always has toiled in a low-level media market, out of sight and certainly out of mind, playing in one of those places that never used to count, the team that was derisively referred to as the Devil Dogs. Complete with players that were just guys with names known only to baseball fans, names that have yet to explode into the culture the way true stars do.

That they are where they are today is an amazing story, the best story in the game. If nothing else, they’re great for baseball, for it sends out the message that you don’t have to have a huge payroll to win, that if you are smart and can acquire a good young nucleus and keep it together for a while you can overcome the odds. It’s the perception that baseball needs, even if the reality so often refutes it.

They are the ultimate underdogs, destiny’s darlings, the little team that could. Use any cliché you want. They all fit. It’s a team that belongs in the movies, those innumerable Hollywood stories about teams that overcome all the odds to win the big game. The Bad News Bears in real life. All that’s missing is Walter Matthau and uniforms that says “Chico’s Bail Bonds” on the back.

So if you are a real sports fan how can you not root for the Rays?

And that’s the rub.

So much of sports has become story lines. In a sound bite world, where everything so often gets reduced to the most elementary level, we love great story lines. Good versus evil. Favorites versus underdogs. One superstar against another. One city versus another.

Story lines.

That’s what always was so great about the Celtics and the Lakers in the 1980s, with Bird versus Magic, and the culture of Boston versus the culture of L.A., the feeling that it was more than just a basketball game. It’s what is so great about the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, arguably as good theater as there is in sport, one that always comes to us wrapped in history and passion.

And in that particular rivalry, the Red Sox always seemed to have the moral high ground, based on the premise that the Yankees always had the bigger payroll, not to mention all their success.

Wasn’t that at the root for the vast appeal for the Red Sox, the fact that their greatest opponent had become their own tortured history?

Wasn’t it the fact that they had become the beautiful losers, the team that that everyone knew eventually was going to lose when it mattered the most?

It was as if for the Red Sox then it was always more of a game. It was a quest, one that had gone for decades, as the players changed, and the managers changed, and everything changed. A beautiful quest that had become almost mythic, as if the Sox could finally win they would be doing so not just for themselves and their fans, but all those players and all those fans that had come before them, all the ones that never had won.

That’s over now, of course.

The result of winning in 2004, the year that changed every-thing, so that now the Sox are the big-payroll team and the Rays are the little-payroll team.

That’s the story line here, the fact that we are now rooting against David, are hoping Goliath takes the little guy out behind the woodshed and not only give him a good old-fashioned whipping, but also give him a little dose of baseball reality. It’s a strange place for the rest of us to be. Hoping the big bully wins always is.

We are so used to being the underdog around here, at least in our view of the baseball world. That was the way the Sox postseason always seemed to be, the sense they were always running uphill, especially against the Yankees. The sense that the Sox were always the underdog, trying to beat those arrogant Yankees with their huge payroll and their sense of entitlement.

Not now.

Now the Red Sox are the team that’s supposed to win this series, courtesy of their high-salaried players and the fact that the Rays are one of the game’s discount teams, a bargain-basement special that’s caught lightning in a bottle and has had a summer out of some fantasy. Now the Red Sox are the big, bad baseball establishment, and the Rays are the team’s that come out of nowhere, the team that underdogs everywhere will be rooting for.

That’s the story line, like it or not.

We are the Yankees.

breynold@projo.com