Of postseasons present and past...

I’ve been saying for a while that this October seems already shaping up to have a 2005-Tony-Graffanino kinda feel to it.

Lately, though, I’d starting thinking that assessment was a bit harsh. After all, who knows. Sure, we’re banged up, definitely don't seem to be the well-balanced, leak-proof attack machine we were last fall.

But October is wide open. Anything can happen. A whole new ball game. Right?

Well, last night I started getting that feeling again.

Time will tell.

Let’s just pray Lester and/or Dice-K can come up big on Wednesday and/or Friday.

And, especially, that Justin Masterson and the bullpen can tow the line.

With luck, Beckett can go on Sunday.

And if he can pitch like Josh Beckett should pitch, all the better.

I just wish I could be as sanguine as Bob Ryan.

In the other news...

I paid a visit last week to a relic of Red Sox’ past.

The 1912 World Series Trophy was at the Cask and Flagon, a quick stop before it heads to New York, where it’ll be auctioned off by Guernsey’s Auction House on October 18 at Madison Square Garden.

The auction is primarily meant as a commemoration of “the closing of Yankee Stadium and the end of a baseball era,” says Guernsey’s president Arlan Ettinger, but there are hundreds of other artifacts on the block, many of them “from the great teams that played against the Yankees.”

The trophy, Ettinger says, “is one of the greatest baseball treasures ever to be offered anywhere, at any time. Physically small, it nevertheless represents one of the greatest achievements ever. It’s certainly one of the most important baseball artifacts that can possibly be sold.”

Back in 1912, the year Fenway Park opened, 11 years before Yankee Stadium was even built, teams didn’t get World Series trophies. Players got rings, but that was it.

But after Smokey Joe Wood and Tris Speaker led the Sox to a 4-3 (with one tie) World Series victory over the New York Giants, John Francis "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, mayor of Boston, future grandfather of John F. Kennedy, and member in good standing of the Royal Rooters — wonder if he knew Hurdy and Stuffy? — decided to commission a trophy in recognition of the team’s achievement.

He made two, in fact. One for owner John I. Taylor, and one for player-manager Jake Stahl. Taylor’s hasn’t been seen since, but Stahl’s having been in his family for generations, and then passed on to a collector, is now up for sale.

It’s your solemn duty — or, perhaps, that of the Yawkey Way ownership troika, who probably have a bit more scratch than you — to make sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

“Is it conceivable that some fanatical Yankee fan could get ahold of it and ceremonially do something to it?” Ettinger asks, miming a lusty sledgehammer swing. Yes.

“But I doubt that. There is a respect. Despite the hatred on the diamond, there is a respect [between the Yankees and Sox]. Sentimentally, though, who wouldn’t root to see this thing back here, where it belongs?”