The Yankees have been in 40 World Series but never as a second-place survivor of the regular season. If the Yankees do get to the Series this year, they will have plenty of precedent to lean on: Twelve teams have already reached the Series in this fashion, over the 23 seasons since Major League Baseball began making room for division runners-up in its playoffs.

And if the Yankees should go on to win the whole thing, they would be the seventh wild-card team to do so. The Marlins managed that feat twice, in 1997 and 2003. The Red Sox did it in 2004, an outcome best forgotten by New Yorkers since it was made possible only by a historic comeback against the Yankees in the A.L.C.S.

The victory parades in those triumphant wild-card cities, it should be noted, were no less enthusiastic than those after 110-win seasons led to championships.

There is also this to consider: The Yankees won their 2017 season series against Boston, 11-8, and there was a real sense in September that they might have taken the division if time hadn’t run out on them. The postseason surge by the Yankees is made all the more delightful by the notion that this group of players is young, exciting and bound to be contending for years to come.

Until now, the Yankees’ performance in the postseason has traditionally correlated with their placement in the regular season. Whenever they qualified as the wild card, they bowed out, and almost always early. They lost in 1995 to Seattle; in 1997 to Cleveland; in 2007 to Cleveland; in 2010 to Texas; and in 2015 to the Astros.