Waking up early Wednesday morning, we all knew that this was the day. We could just feel it.

Call it intuition, call it idiocy, call it what you will, but somehow we knew that Wednesday was going to be the day when the Red Sox finally conquered the Yankees and sent the pinstripe-wearing incarnations of evil back to the depths from whence they came.

This was going to be the day when the Yankee backers were going be the ones shaking their heads in disgust and using their “Not in Our House” banners to wipe their tears. This was going to be the day when Boston, the perennial bridesmaid, finally walked down the aisle wearing white.

This confidence against the Yankees, which seemed to be the last thing a reasonable Sox fan should have, was growing stronger with each come-from-behind win. The Yankees were hemorrhaging, and the Red Sox Nation could smell the blood in the water.

All of a sudden, the air of invincibility had deserted the mighty Yankees. They finally appeared mortal against Boston.

If we went to class Wednesday, we spent most of it reading the Bill Simmons column we printed off of ESPN Page 2 or drawing the Sox logo and the pointy B on our notebooks. We spent the afternoon pacing around our rooms, channeling positive energy to Derek Lowe’s right arm and trying to avoid seeing the nightmare tape loop of Boston losses that was trying to creep into our heads.

We told ourselves that this time it was going to happen for us.

And we Believed — with a capital B.

Near game time, we put on our lucky sweatshirts, the ones we had been wearing for the last three nail-biting, pulse-pounding, intestine-eroding Sox victories.

We didn’t care that they smelled like a combination of sweat, cigarettes, beer, Kevin Millar and the Spaghetti-O’s we spilled on them on Monday. To us, they smelled like victory.

We put on our game faces. Not Tanyon Sturtze’s series-long deer-in-headlights look or Bronson Arroyo’s game 3 burst-into-tears look, but our bring-on-The-Curse faces, an expression that was indignantly displayed just underneath the brims of a million Sox hats around the country. This was Luke against Vader. This was good against evil. This was war.

We were on our feet from the first pitch to the final out, pacing and calculating and offering Terry Francona our managerial input from a thousand miles away.

We crossed our fingers and knocked on wood four times an inning, urging on the unkempt free swinger Mark Bellhorn, the cagey veteran Bill Mueller and ever-clutch Trot Nixon as if our lives depended on it.

We released a collective sigh of relief when a cheating A-Rod was called out after winding up and slapping the ball out of Arroyo’s mitt late in game 6. And we laughed at how awkward he looked doing it.

We blared Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks” every time Johnny Damon came up to bat in an effort to break him out of his series-long slump, and he did everything but walk on water in game 7 to renew our faith as only he could.

We screamed rabidly at the television when David Ortiz, whose clutch hitting tore through New York City worse than a rampaging King Kong, slammed nail after nail after nail into the Yankee coffin.

We held our breath when Pedro Martinez’s pitch count approached triple digits. We couldn’t help but love his enthusiasm and wonder about his sanity given his dugout antics, his Jules from “Pulp Fiction” hairdo and his practice of toting a Dominican midget around as a mascot for much of the postseason.

We winced through all 99 excruciating Curt Schilling pitches in game 6, knowing that what we were watching was one of the gutsiest, most selfless performances in sports history. Schilling’s fragile ankle tendon and blood-soaked right sock kept us on pins and needles for his entire outing, and we admired him every hobbling step of the way.

We smirked thinking about how fast George Steinbrenner’s blood pressure was going to rise when he watched himself signing checks on a Visa commercial and realized that his $194 million payroll wasn’t enough to buy another pennant.

We also could have sworn we saw Yankees general manager Brian Cashman scouring the employment section of the New York Post classified ads during the fifth inning of game 7.

And we went to bed smiling, knowing that Yankees players and fans had to accept the simple fact that this year, finally, Boston was their daddy.