If someone asked you to bet on something happening that had never happened before, you’d ask for better odds than 40-1, right? Right. Those are terrible odds for a true genesis, a never-before event.

But when the New York Yankees took a 3-0 lead in the 2004 American League Championship Series, I had to take what I could get. And 40-1 was it. The Red Sox were going to be the first team to ever come back from being down 3-0 in a seven-game Major League Baseball series and they would go on to win the World Series. I knew it.

As for just how bad a get this was, on paper? When I placed it, of the 24 postseason MLB series that had been led 3-0, in only five of those series did the trailing team go on to win at least one game. I was betting that the Red Sox would not only win four games in a row, but then go on and win the World Series, too.

As a Yankees fan, watching a 3-0 ALCS lead turn into a Red Sox series win is literally my worst case baseball scenario. The two teams can’t play in the World Series at the same time, the Yankees can’t have a bigger lead without winning the series outright, and I want to beat no team more than the arch-rival Sox.

Keep the World Series trophy. We already have plenty. Just beat the damned Red Sox. That I feel this way speaks volumes about the vindictive nature of my sports-fan character.

So it was from the lofty heights where unicorn dreams prance free and the on cotton-candy-filament breeze of children’s hopes that I threw a tiny, cautionary, $20 dark cloud, an emotional-insurance umbrella policy, over the proceedings.

And this is what makes me a chicken-shit Yankees fan.

For $20, I guaranteed one of three things: I would either watch the Yankees beat the Red Sox in the ALCS, I would win $800, or I would watch the Red Sox lose the World Series. For sure, the former was the preferable outcome.

The latter would still involve my having to watch my favorite team systematically destruct to an extent never before seen, and far worse, having to endure the ever-accelerating avalanche of icy, stinging taunts, barbs, and vulgar attacks on my personal hygiene, sexual proclivities, and inherent worth as a human being, courtesy of my friends.

Bankrupt a man and he is able to earn a dollar that same day. Have his team lose a 3-0 ALDS lead, and he feasts on ignominy for the rest of his days. Such are the foul wages of history-making bed-shittings.

One-upping even my most cataclysmic doomsday scenario, the Yankees held a one-run lead into the bottom of the 9th inning in Game 4, putting me three outs away from a quick self-castigation session for so pointlessly and cowardly throwing $20 out the window.

Note this, also. I would have felt mild pleasure at their winning the series. I would have felt moderate disgust at my stupid wager.

When the best thing that can possibly happen is occasion for feeble mirth and a statistically insignificant downside raises the bile in the back of your throat, your lens on the world isn’t unfocused, it’s cracked dead in half, and you need to spend an enormous amount of time thinking about how you see things, react to things, and experience things relative to other people.

In this case? In this case I watched the ultimate fatalist’s wager come in, and Red Sox fans, please know that the filthiest $800 I’ve ever handled in my life did nothing whatever to Febreze the hot-garbage-smell stink-shame that was on all me after what was ALDS 2004.

And if you point your nose Bronxward on a particularly ripe August afternoon, you might still catch a faint whiff. The money’s long gone. But the olfactory echoes of immemorial stench endure forever.