I’ll readily — and happily — admit that I’m as delighted as any Red Sox fan that the Boys from Beantown are 8-0 this season against the Overpaid Egomaniacs of the Evil Empire, formerly known as the Bronx Bombers, now merely the Bronx Bombed (in Boston, at least).

Based on their performances against the Red Sox in 2009, if the Yankees were a Broadway play, they’d have folded already. On the biggest stage in baseball, the Yanks have been a flop, not a hit, despite an abundance of star power for which they’ve paid the proverbial pretty penny — more than 20 billion of them (pennies, that is) this year alone.

While all that money has bought only embarrassment in New York, the Red Sox (who, it must be acknowledged, are not exactly knocking on the door of the poorhouse, although they don’t reside in the same, Fort Knox-gated community as the spendthrift Yanks) are deliriously happy to be 8-and-oh in oh-9 against their archrivals.

Oh, my goodness, ain’t that grand?

After all those torturous decades of listening to Yankees fans lord it over them, what Red Sox rooter doesn’t delight in the fact that, not only have two World Series championship banners have been raised in Boston since one was last run up the flagpole in the Bronx, but now also that the Sox have turned the Yanks into their own, personal, American League version of the woeful Washington Nationals. Or, perhaps even more accurately, the Washington Generals, perennial losers to the Harlem Globetrotters.

It is, indeed, sweeter than Caroline, she of the nightly 8th-inning Fenway songfest. Good times, indeed. So good, so good, so good.

The Yankees shelled out nearly $500 million over the winter to sign free-agent pitchers C.C. Sabathia and A.J. Burnett and slugging first baseman Mark Teixeira — who played the role of teenage beauty queen while teasing Boston management, making them think they had a chance with him, when, all the while, he was merely making the Yankees, his first choice all along, up the ante.

Yet the Sox, despite losing out on Teixeira, have owned — absolutely owned — the Yanks this season.

Between now and Aug. 6, when next the two titans of the A.L. East meet again, Boston fans can sit in the warm sun with a cool beverage and contemplate the sundry ways the Sox have dispatched the overmatched New Yorkers.

This past week’s three-game sweep at Fenway provided plenty of highlights.

In the opener, there was Josh Beckett, pitching the way he did in 2007, when he won 20 games and then went 4-0 in the postseason, leading the Sox to the championship. He gave up just one hit through six innings before turning the ball over to the Boston bullpen — easily the best in baseball and, when it comes down to it, the biggest reason that it is the Sox and not the Yankees, who have problems in the ’pen, who are in first place today.

Beckett got all the run support he needed when David “Big Papi” Ortiz, showing signs of snapping out of his season-long slump, drilled a two-run homer off high-priced free-agent Burnett, who is only 4-3, with a 4.89 ERA, so far for the Yanks. Burnett didn’t make it out of the third inning as Boston rolled, 7-0.

 Nor could Chien-Ming Wang, who’s 0-4 this season, get through the third the following night, as the Sox jumped out to a 6-2 lead and hung on to win, 6-5.

 The Yanks were close to finally winning a game Thursday night, when they took a 3-1 lead into the eighth behind Sabathia. But Boston rallied for three runs in the bottom of that inning, pulling out another victory.

 It was reminiscent of the game at Fenway in April when, two runs down with two outs in the ninth, and with future Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera on the mound to close it out for New York, Jason Bay hit a two-run homer to send the game into extra innings. Kevin Youkilis then won it, 5-4, with a walkoff homer in the 11th.

 The following day, the Yanks staked Burnett to a 6-0 lead. But he couldn’t hold it, and the Sox pounded their way to a 16-11 victory. Then, in the finale, Jacoby Ellsbury ensured his place in the Sox’s 2009 highlight film with a startling, thrilling, steal of home that put an exclamation point on Boston’s 4-1 win.

Throw in two more wins in the first week of last month in the Yankees’ new wind tunnel of a ballpark in the Bronx, where the grossly overpriced seats are accusingly empty, in mute testimony to the ostentatious excess that led to the nation’s current financial woes, and you have eight victories in as many games for the Sox over the frustrated Yanks.

But here’s the thing to remember about this ongoing drama: Based on the fact the two teams still have 10 games against each other left to play, we’ve only seen Act One.

Excessively celebrating Boston’s early season success could turn out like 1978, when the Yankees trailed the Sox by 14 games in mid-July, but wound up tied at the end of the regular season, and then won an infamous (at least in Boston) playoff game at Fenway for the pennant.

Despite their struggles so far against the Sox, it’s hard to imagine these Yankees falling double-digit games — or even close to that — off the pace.

Still, the Sox are in first and, when they go to New York two months hence, it’ll be the Yankees saying: “It’s August, and we still haven’t beaten Boston.”