Just three years have gone by without the Yankees winning the World Series, but it seems like forever. And if another year passes with the victory parade being held in some other city, it is time to ask whether the Yankee dynasty truly is dead.

I didn’t invent that idea. Buster Olney, who covered the team for The New York Times and now writes for ESPN the Magazine, wrote an excellent book published this year called The Night the Dynasty Died. In it, he says the dynasty ended in October, 2001, when Randy Johnson, Curt Schilling and the Arizona Diamondbacks ended the Yankees’ run of three-straight world championships.

Yankee fans would say it’s a preposterous idea. Their team is hardly dead. It has made the playoffs every year since 1995, won the AL East every year since 1996, and played in the World Series five of the last six years and seven of the last nine. There’s not a team in any sport on the planet that plays anywhere other than in the Bronx that would complain about that record.

But this year will tell if Olney was right and something vital to the Yankees died that night in Phoenix when Mariano Rivera misplayed a bunt and then was defeated by a broken-bat looper struck by Luis Gonzalez. Come close without winning it all four-straight years, and you’re not a dynasty anymore. You’re the Buffalo Bills. And with a 2-0 loss to the Twins on Tuesday, New York's already at a disadvantage.

Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, and Rivera are the only players left who started the run in 1996. Jorge Posada is the next longest-serving Yankee, and he’s been around for most of the grand times.

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But in 2001, the Yankees said goodbye to Scott Brosius, Tino Martinez and Paul O’Neill, the blue-collar guys who didn’t do anything spectacular but knew what it took to win.

Better players — or at least players with better stats — replaced them: Alex Rodriguez, Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield. But, as Olney writes, the Yankees stopped being a great team that night in Arizona and started being what they were in the 1980s — a collection of talent assembled by checkbook with no thought to chemistry and no understanding of the ups and downs of a quintessentially unpredictable game.

But the real change in the Yankees hasn’t been in position players. The starting pitching is vastly less talented than the staff that won those four titles. There is no workhorse like Andy Pettitte, no brilliance like Roger Clemens, no grit like David Wells. It is a rotation without a fifteen-game winner on a team that won more than 100 games.

Their victory total is a testament as much to their persistence as it is to George Steinbrenner’s bank account. The Yankees rallied to win more than 60 times this season, more often than anyone in the game’s history. That’s shows resilience, but it also shows a team that falls behind a lot.

They got away with their mediocre starting pitching all season. But now, in the playoffs, the feeling is they will be exposed. If they are, there can be no doubt that the glorious years are over, and a new era of near glory — which is the worst kind — has begun.

And if they fall to the Minnesota Twins, who spend less on their whole team than the Yankees spend on three infield positions, the Yankees will be nothing more than high-priced losers.

I was going to say they bring such approbation on themselves, but that’s neither true nor fair to the players. The men who pull on the uniforms every day are no different than the players on any other team. They just have more talented people dressing in the cubicles next to them. And they make more money.

But the players don’t come into spring training saying they’re going to win every year. They don’t curse out the hired help and swear that there will be changes every time they come a game or a series short of their game’s grand prize. They don’t scream at the general manager every time the team loses three in a row.

But if they don’t bring it on themselves, it comes with the job, courtesy of the man who brings it on them — Steinbrenner. He’s the one who made it a mortal sin to lose the final game of the World Series. He’s the one who declares that the Yankees — meaning himself — are successful only when they win it all. It’s because of him that people like me write about what a failure it is if a season begins without a championship banner being run up the centerfield flagpole.

It’s been three years without a banner, three years which Steinbrenner has grown increasingly irascible and the atmosphere in the Yankee clubhouse has become thick with unceasing pressure and the demand to win not just a lot of games, but every game.

Just as every victory in the 90’s brought more confidence and success, every loss since then has brought the opposite. Instead of showing patience and carefully tweaking the product, Steinbrenner flogs a few of the underlings, exiles some players, then goes down to Players ‘R’ Us and buys whatever shiny object catches his fancy. Then he says, “There, I got you the best players. Now don’t blow it.”

There’s a difference between great players and great teams. The Yankees have one but haven’t been the other. But it’s another October and another chance to reclaim greatness.

If not, it will add to the evidence that the Yankee dynasty is no more.

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