Cody Bellinger came up to bat with a chance to put the game away, but I was too busy trying to counter the chants from the surprisingly loud Red Sox faction at Yankee Stadium: battle cries of “Let’s Go Red Sox,” interpolated with the more aggressive “Fuck the Red Sox.” Welcome to game two of the AL Wild Card Series between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. It’s an exercise in nostalgia, and hate simmers at an unusually low flame.

With the score at 5-1 and a chance to blow the game open, sending the Yankees to Tampa Bay for a date with the Rays, Bellinger cracked a home run to right. As screaming fans draped all over my back, a rivalry that's been rhapsodized throughout history felt, well, average? The Yankees were advancing to the ALDS more than they were beating the Red Sox, but something still twinkled inside of me knowing we sent Boston home. The chants were loud but the rapport was friendlier, so much so that legions of transplant Red Sox fans felt safe enough to come to the Bronx. “We got to chase these people out,” I said to a friend. It’s not the 2000s anymore, though, and there we were: Yankees and Red Sox faithful, side by side in begrudging harmony.

The rivalry used to be the biggest in American sports. There remain moments of discord, of irritability and frustration, but it is not the anxious, intense, disagreeable, nail-biting struggle that it was from about the late-1990s to the mid-2000s, when I was taught that the Red Sox were an evil that must be eradicated, as much Tom and Jerry as it was a sporting event. So, going into this week’s playoff series (a rematch of last year’s Wild Card bout that saw the Yankees win in three games), I felt wistful for a time when this famous rivalry featured improbable comebacks, catty trash talk, and Pedro Martinez side-stepping and then yanking Don Zimmer by his head.

Red Sox fans and Yankees fans will forever keep score, but we’ve drifted awfully far from the days of bloody duels on Jerome Avenue and Lansdowne Street. Other than inhabitants of these two notorious East Coast cities, does anyone really care about the blood feud? Manny Ramirez, David Ortiz, Derek Jeter, and Mariano Rivera once stopped the world in its tracks. Now, other Great American cities win titles while Yankee fans pout.

As the rivalry mutates, so too does the game of baseball. The Evil Empire mantle now belongs to the Los Angeles Dodgers, winner of back-to-back championships and manic collector of superstar free agents, from Shohei Ohtani to Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The Boston Red Sox, meanwhile, have won four championships since Yankees manager Aaron Boone sent that ball flying into the October night, jumping for joy as he miraculously found his stroke in the eleventh inning, and hour. For all of the victories the Yankees have accumulated over the past twenty years—they rank second behind the Dodgers in regular season wins over that time span— they have struggled since 2009 to find the kind of postseason success that would satisfy the late George Steinbrenner. Sure, the Yankee standard presents impossible expectations, but fans have to wonder if the club will ever win a World Series in the Aaron Judge era. As it stands, though, the Yankees look more like the Bronx Zoo teams of the late 70s and 80s than like certified juggernauts.

Since the 2003 and 2004 ALCS—two legendary seven-game series that saw chaotic brawls and extra-innings heroics—the game has changed dramatically. For one, the AL East became more competitive, with the Rays employing speed, timely hitting, and crisp, methodical defense to usurp the far-more-expensive Yankees and Red Sox. The Blue Jays, too, vastly improved, riding a red-hot Vladimir Guerrero Jr. in last year’s ALDS to defeat the Yankees in four games despite Judge’s best efforts. Across the American League these days, the Red Sox and the Yankees scan as merely normal, plenty capable of reaching the postseason but lacking the juice to do much more.

But is this, actually, the beginning of an equally interesting, far more level-headed chapter in the Yankees-Red Sox story? After all, all those years of shared acrimony felt unsustainable. The climate, now, is much different, giving way to a strange feeling of respect resulting from close proximity and the shadow of those previous wars. In the early 2000’s, the Red Sox hadn’t won a World Series since selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees, who often ended their title hopes in horrific fashion. Perhaps those days of friction and hostility will return, but for the moment they register more like grainy highlights than bitter memories.

In a way, this trajectory rhymes with that of baseball itself. The old-school approach to management and roster building has faded, replaced by an analytics movement pioneered by Billy Beane and Bill James. The geeks, as it turned out, inherited the earth, leaving traditional and time-worn baseball scouting methods in the dust. Aces are more mindful of their pitch counts—so much so that it was a surprise, in Tuesday’s game one, that Boone left Cy Young favorite Cam Schlitter in the game through six innings. Hitters, meanwhile, are taught to use their power more and steal bases less. The tide has turned, and Major League Baseball is an exercise in statistical analysis, spin rates and exit velocities, more than it is a roster-building arms race. Like all aspects of American life, perhaps, the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry has been subdued by the reign of computers.