When Joe Torre was the manager of the last major league team to win back-to-back championships and the New York Yankees faced moments like the Los Angeles Dodgers face now, at the precipice of elimination, he would remind the players how great they were.

"It was always one of the biggest parts of Joe Torre's speeches," recalled Paul O'Neill, the right fielder for the Yankees at that time. "He'd say, 'The talent in this room is good enough to win this.' When he said it, you believed it."

The accomplishments of those Yankees teams are presented neatly in the record book, like perfectly boxed museum relics: Those Yankees won the World Series in 1998, 1999 and 2000 -- three consecutive seasons, the heart of a dynasty bookended by the 1996 championship and a Game 7 loss in the 2001 World

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