MINNEAPOLIS — These are supposed to be treacherous first steps into the postseason, these best-of-five series that determine the winners of the four division series. Five-game series allow for flukes, for accidents, for inexplicable outcomes far more often than best-of-sevens do. You can get an upset out of a best-of-seven but you’re going to have to earn it.

Best-of-five?

Before you know it, after the six-month grind, after 162 games, after the everyday marathon of a baseball season, you can be out of time, out of luck and out of season before you even break a sweat. And in October baseball, where pitching is king, that can cause a lot of outliers. You might even call it … a crapshoot.

Funny, though. In New York, we have rarely seen that. The Mets, especially, have had a remarkable affinity for winnings best-of-fives, as they’ve never lost even once in the six such series they’ve played: 1969 NLCS (3-0 over the Braves), 1973 (3-2 over the Reds), 1999 NLDS (3-1 over the Diamondbacks), 2000 NLDS (3-1 over the Giants), 2006 NLDS (3-0 over the Dodgers) and 2015 NLDS (3-2 over the Dodgers).

As with most things historical, the Yankees have played far more of these series in their time than the Mets have, and while they’ve taken a few lumps it’s actually remarkable to note that they’ve also won these torturous gauntlet series with remarkable regularity. Since first appearing in the ’76 ALCS the Yankees are 16-8 in them.

Often, they’ve had home field, which is often or not as big a benefit as it should be because all a road team needs to do is snatch a split out of the first two games of a series and it guarantees a must-win game for the team with the better record. To win two-thirds of these short series is one of the remarkable legacies of the Yankees’ glorious history that isn’t often celebrated.

The very first such series ended, of course, in one of the great moments in all the Yankees Octobers, Chris Chambliss’ walk-off, ninth-inning home run of Kansas City’s Mark Littell, necessitated by George Brett’s three-run, game-tying home run off Grant Jackson in the eighth inning.

The next year, trailing 3-1 in the eighth, the Yankees scored once in the eighth and three times in the ninth for the come-from-the-dead victory that helped launch them toward their first World Series title in 15 years. That game, you may recall, began in a shroud of controversy when Billy Martin decided to bench Reggie Jackson because lefty Paul Splittorff was starting the game.

Thirty years later, that still didn’t sit well with Reggie.

“What would YOU do if you had to fill out that lineup card?” he said, half smiling and half sneering, during spring training of 2017.

Reggie might be known for his World Series heroics. But he also delivered a memorable home run in what was essentially the first AL Division Series, in 1981, a season that had been truncated by a strike and so two winners of the AL East were forced to meet that October. The Yankees had won the first two games in Milwaukee but the Brewers won Games 3 and 4 in New York.

After Game 4 George Steinbrenner and catcher Rick Cerone engaged in a profane debate. Tensions were high. The Brewers jumped to a two-run lead, but in the bottom of the fourth inning Jackson clobbered a Moose Haas pitch against the facing separating the second and third decks at the old Stadium. After the game, a 7-3 Yankees win, Jackson was asked where the ball had landed.

“Second bleeping base,” he said, smiling.

The Yankees losses have often been memorable. In 1980, of course, Brett hit a series-clinching homer off Goose Gossage that might still be traveling if it hadn’t collided with the upper deck. Don Mattingly’s career ended in a haze of tears in 1995, when the Yankees couldn’t hold an 11th-inning Game 5 lead (or a 2-0 advantage in games), Edgar Martinez chasing Junior Griffey around for the winning run.

But 16-8 is 16-8, and the Yankees on Monday night had a chance to make that 17-8. They generally take care of business, even treacherous business.

It’s what the Yankees do in October.