Mike Celizic

None of this should be happening. A bunch of kids, no matter how talented, shouldn't be able to treat seasoned veterans — champion veterans — like a rental car.

That’s what makes this ALCS between the Dead Sox and the Rays something you have to watch. It’s something you’ve never seen before, something you didn’t even consider possible.

It goes against everything that life and Hollywood have taught us about sports. When a kid first starts to feel his oats, he’s supposed to swagger into the old-timer’s arena and get his clock cleaned. That’s the way it worked in movies from “The Hustler” to “King Pin.” The kid gets his butt handed to him on a silver platter, learns a valuable lesson, works his way back up. It’s only in the last reel that he comes back, slightly older and enormously wiser, and dethrones the king.

That’s because talent isn’t enough to win complicated games that demand that talent be tempered with experience and mental toughness. Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods didn’t win the first major tournaments they ever qualified for. Even the best who ever played had to learn how to win.

Somebody forgot to explain that to the Rays, a team as young and raw as any that ever took the field in October. Things can still change, but at the moment, they’re not just eking out victories over Boston’s finest. They’re thrashing the defending world champions and treating the ALCS as if it’s nothing more than a spring-training game against the Royals. This isn’t David slaying Goliath. It’s the kid who’s spent the last nine years getting beaten up by the school bully beating up the entire senior class.

I don’t care if you don’t know Evan Longoria from Eva Longoria. I don’t care if you never heard of B.J. Upton and Carl Crawford and Akinori Iwamura and Willy Aybar and the other kids who are cruising through October as if they’ve been doing it all their lives.

One year ago, they weren’t the worst team in their division or the worst team in the American League. They were the worst team in baseball. Kansas City won three more games than the 66 wins the Rays had. Pittsburgh had two more.

How can you not watch the show they’re putting on against the Red Sox? I don’t care which team you’re a fan of, this is history in the making.

From a Boston perspective, it’s like an awful car crash. It’s gory and ugly and repelling and nauseating. But you’ve got to slow down to gape at the carnage. And then you have to drive around the block to gape at it again.

Special feature Breaking down Phillies vs. Rays Position-by-position comparisons, pitching matchups, prediction, more

From a Tampa perspective, it’s like having raised a kid so awkward he went 0-for-42 in t-ball, and that was when he was 12. And then he does grow out of it and becomes captain of all the high school sports teams. When he was a kid, you didn’t want to talk about it and couldn’t even bear to watch him play, and now you’re bragging to total strangers in the street about how swell he is.

And if you’re a fan of neither team, you still have to watch. It’s like the Colonists whupping on the Redcoats. It’s more than an upset in the making, it’s a revolution.

Remember everything you heard about how kids thrown into their first postseason tend to tighten up? Throw that out the window. It took the Rays 65 innings to commit their first error in October. That’s seven full games.

Then there’s Longoria. He turned 23 a little more than a week ago and he’s already set a record for rookies with five postseason home runs and tied Bernie Williams’ record of knocking one out in three straight ALCS games.

Crawford and Aybar, the fifth and sixth-place hitters for the Rays, were 9-for-10 in the Game 4 massacre. And the Rays — those young, inexperienced, formerly worst-in-baseball kids from Tampa — were 8-for-12 with runners in scoring position.

And the highly paid, battle-tested, defending-champion Red Sox? Would you believe 3-for-10, and those hits all came late in the game when the outcome was long since decided.

We’ve never seen anything like it, and who knows when we will again. In a year that’s been filled with great stories from the Super Bowl to Beijing to the Ryder Cup, this could be the greatest show of all.

MORE FROM BASEBALL

Baseball Section Front

Big shock coming for some free agents Hot stove roundup: Sabathia to the Giants? Red Sox give Pedroia 6-year, $40.5 million deal Braves to get RHP Vazquez from White Sox Hampton finalizes $2M, 1-year deal with Astros Mariners agree to deal with Branyan Rumors: Blalock a Teixeira fallback option Blyleven: A call to arms for the Tigers At Bat: Expect busy winter from ChiSox Kidnappers kill ex-Cubs catcher's brother Baseball Section Front   Add Baseball headlines to your news reader: