"Today we are all Philadelphians," Kevin Cullen, metro columnist for the Boston Globe, told me.

File this under: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Cullen was invoking the spirit of a famous headline in the Paris newspaper Le Monde after Sept. 11, 2001. When it comes to Boston's feelings about the Yankees, all is historic, nothing is understated. We're talking about a rivalry that's referred to as Athens vs. Sparta, good vs. the Evil Empire.

"Honestly," said Hart Brachen, who writes the "Soxaholix" blog, "the hate has been going on so long that it's like the Hatfields and McCoys, where nobody can even remember what started it."

Philadelphia needs no pointers when it comes to disliking New York teams, but for decades the Yanks have been in another league, so to speak. Since the Whiz Kids' loss in a sweep to the Yankees nearly 60 years ago, the teams had not met when all was on the line until yesterday's World Series game.

Good cheers

"Atta boy," said Beth Walsh, clapping under the big screen as the Yankees made their first out in the first inning. Unlike some of the others at the bar, she was rooting for the Phillies as much as she was rooting against the Yankees.

"I like the Phillies," said Walsh, 45, an administrative assistant wearing the Sox jersey of captain Jason Varitek. "I like how their fans travel to Fenway in buses. I'd like to see them go back to back. And if that means the Yankees lose, that's gravy."

This rivalry stretches back two centuries, but for all intents we can understand it by starting in 1920. That was after Harry Frazee announced he'd sold a heavy-hitting pitcher named Babe Ruth to the damn Yankees.

Separated at birth

What's our problem? Must be that Quaker humility. Owen Wister, a Philadelphia writer whose 1902 Western, The Virginian, became an instant best-seller, said people in his hometown had "a civic instinct of disparagement."

Here's a reason to resent New York from my own childhood. I grew up just outside Boston and didn't visit the big city until I was nearly 20. ("Why would you go to New York when you have Boston and Cambridge right here?" my Aunt Ethel once asked me.)

So it's freshman year of college, in Evanston, Ill. Homecoming weekend, I remember, because my roommate's mother was visiting from the Upper West Side. The three of us step into an elevator in our dorm, and there stands an older couple, husband and wife, who look as straight out of the prairie as anything Grant Wood ever painted.

My roommate's mother asks them, "Are you from New York?"

Why not? It's that New York sense that they are the world, that everything revolves around them, that they are deserving of it all, every season, year after year. God, I need therapy.

Well, I've come to the right place.