BOSTON — Ask Alex Cora about the difficulty of winning consecutive championships, and you’re setting him up for a punch line.

“I don’t know,” Cora, the manager of the Boston Red Sox, said with a wink on Saturday. “I won back to back in ’17 and ’18, you know?”

That he did, though Cora had to switch teams to do it. He was the bench coach for Houston in 2017 before joining the Red Sox after the Astros won the World Series. Another title followed in Boston. But no team has repeated as champions since the Yankees won three in a row from 1998 to 2000, and these Red Sox will soon extend that streak.

They have not been eliminated from the playoffs, not yet. But this weekend’s four-game Yankees series has the feeling of desperation in New England, where autumn is in the air, football is on the mind and the bullpen is as crowded as the South Station T stop on a Monday morning.