ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Reality dropped onto the Yankees on Sunday like the lid of a coffin slamming shut on their playoff hopes.

You could sense it in their hushed voices and downcast eyes. You could feel it in the mood of a clubhouse that couldn't be any lower if it were located in the La Brea tar pits. You could read it in their comments, peppered as they were with words such as "shocking," "devastating" and "horrible."

This is a team that has always measured itself against the best, and for the past three days, it has been clear that they no longer measure up. The Yankees aren't the standard anymore, nor are the Red Sox, the only team they ever figured they had to worry about and the only team, from day one of spring training, that they absolutely, positively knew they had to beat.

But the Red Sox are just another team now, scuffling for that consolation prize into October, the wild-card berth, and the Yankees are spinning their wheels chasing them.

For years, even in the depths of their struggles, the Yankees and their fans could always draw strength and belief from their history. But that history is receding further into the past every season. Now it seems almost as murky and sepia-toned as old newsreel footage of Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio.

This year, the teams to beat are in Tampa Bay and the South Side of Chicago and, most formidable of all, on the wrong side of Los Angeles, the side where the stars either come out of an inkwell or a computer program and nobody needs to grease a maitre d' to get into a restaurant.

Sunday's 4-3 loss to the Angels, baseball's best team, ostensibly was the most encouraging game the Yankees played all weekend. At the same time, it was the most dispiriting, because it was the kind of game the Yankees of old -- as opposed to what we have now, the old Yankees -- would have won.

From the first inning, when they threatened to run the Angels out of their own ballpark, to the top of the eighth, when they had the go-ahead run on second with one out and their hottest hitter at the plate, to the bottom of the ninth, with the ball safely in the right hand of Mariano Rivera, this was a Yankees ballgame all the way.

Yet it was the Angels who wound up winning it, the Angels who celebrated while the Yankees walked off the field in the posture of losers: heads down, hopes dying.

With three more to play here next month, that makes it five of seven lost to the Angels, a discouraging prospect considering they would be the Yankees' likely Division Series opponent. That is, if the Yankees can make up the four games they are behind Boston in the wild-card race and leapfrog the Twins, against whom they open a series in Minnesota on Monday night.

"I'm not saying there's plenty of time anymore," said Joe Girardi, whose tough-guy facade is beginning to show some cracks.

"It was a devastating series for us," Alex Rodriguez said. Asked if the Yankees are running out of time, A-Rod offered one emphatic word: "Yes."

Even Derek Jeter, who'd find the bright side of a solar eclipse, said, "We dug ourselves a hole here. It's getting to the point where we gotta win games."

Jeter had as bad a weekend as his team, going 2-for-11. Still, he was better than Bobby Abreu, who went 2-for-13 with one egregious baserunning mistake Sunday, a gaffe that turned a potentially huge first inning into a two-run disappointment.

After that, the Yankees went 0-for-10 with runners in scoring position. Four times in the game, they got a runner to third with one or fewer outs, and four times he went no further.

So how much of a surprise, really, could it have been when on Rivera's first and only pitch of the game, a bleeder by Angels pest Chone Figgins found its way between Wilson Betemit, who was breaking to cover first, and Robinson Cano, who was shaded toward second, to drive in the winning run of the game?

Teams like the Yankees, who lack killer instinct, are often slain by teams like the Angels, who have a ton of it.

"It just seems like when these guys get something going, they get the job done," Andy Pettitte said of the Angels, the clear implication being that with the Yankees, the opposite is true.

The most obvious example of this came in the eighth, when Rodriguez, having hit a one-out double off the wall, decided to steal third with Xavier Nady at the plate and was cut down. A-Rod and Girardi tried to justify the episode as "a bad call" (maybe) and "a smart play" (definitely not).

It didn't show initiative, it didn't show hustle and it certainly didn't show brains. All it showed was what other, lesser teams used to show playing the Yankees: desperation.

The Yankees are one of those other, lesser teams now, and if they weren't sure of it before, the Angels drove the point home like a stake through the heart of their October dreams.