Commentary: The Yankees had the Dodgers on the ropes. Then came the nightmare.

NEW YORK – Get out the scalpel and the forceps. Let’s dissect the inning that cost the New York Yankees – the proud, 27-time World Series champion New York Yankees – a chance to extend the 120th World Series. It already reeks of formaldehyde, though no one in the Bronx wants it preserved. Look away, Yankees fans. Except swiveling your heads Wednesday night might take the gaze to the infield at Yankee Stadium, where the Los Angeles Dodgers piled upon themselves.

“This is, like … as bad as it gets,” ace right-hander Gerrit Cole said, haltingly, still stunned hours later. “It’s the worst feeling you can have.”

The view from altitude of Game 5 was this: Cole entered the top of the fifth inning having allowed the Dodgers no hits, needing just 49 pitches to record the first 12 outs. He held a 5-0 lead. He was dominant, and the Yankees looked poised to become the first team to force a sixth game after trailing a World Series 3-0. Make the Dodgers fly back across the country wondering whether they’d be champions or chokers – well, anything was possible.

Instead, in the fifth, the Yankees got out a gift box, reached for some wrapping paper and found a pretty bow. One source said they accompanied their present with a lovely bouquet of flowers – Dodgers blue-and-white hydrangeas, the source said. Waiting on confirmation.

“Wild inning,” Cole said. “They made it tough on us.”

Come on, Gerrit. That’s only partially true. You made it tough on yourselves.

“We didn’t take care of the ball well enough in that inning,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “Against a great team like that, they took advantage.”

To be clear, the Dodgers won the World Series because the Dodgers were the better team. Their lineup was deeper and more consistent. Their bullpen was elastic and electric. And their defense was nearly flawless.

But because of the way this unfolded, the Yankees can’t be left merely tipping their cap to a superior opponent and saying, “See ya next spring.” This ate at them as Wednesday night turned into Thursday morning, over the course of a clubhouse meeting that extended some 45 minutes after the final out. They shared words about the season they just experienced. They now share an experience that is nothing short of haunting.

“Obviously, it stings now,” Boone said. “But this is going to sting forever.”

Scalpels ready? Lab coats on? Let the dissection begin.

The fifth opened with the first hit off Cole, a single to right from postseason stud Kiké Hernández. No problem. It’s still 5-0. Cole still had his Grade A stuff.

“Really brilliant,” Boone said of his $324 million right-hander. ” … I thought he was in complete command of his emotions, or just of his nerves and the calm he had out there, which showed up right away in his command of all his pitches.”

The fifth inning tested that calm, if it didn’t outright fray it. The next hitter was NLCS MVP Tommy Edman, who hit a harmless, soft liner to center, where Aaron Judge awaited. Judge, the presumed American League MVP, had shaken off a postseason skid with a two-run homer in the first to help the Yankees build that lead. In the fourth, when he made a beautiful running catch at the wall to take away extra bases from the indefatigable Freddie Freeman, the buoyant crowd of 49,263 chanted, “MVP! MVP!” Yankee Stadium filled with possibility.

And then Judge inexplicably dropped Edman’s ball.

Did it knuckle? Was he blinded by the lights?

“I just didn’t make the play,” Judge said.

So with runners at first and second, here came Dodgers catcher Will Smith. He bounced a ball to shortstop. Anthony Volpe, the local kid who was the grand slam-hitting Game 4 hero, made an aggressive play to try to get Hernández with a force at third. The ball skipped – “a little bit of a short-hop,” Boone said – and third baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. couldn’t pick it. Safe all around. Another error. Bases loaded.

If the 5-0 lead had built a solid foundation for a trip back to Los Angeles, the cracks were showing. To his enormous credit, Cole stood tall.

“As a player, if there’s a mistake on the field, you try to look at it as an opportunity to pick somebody else up,” he said. “You’re never really going to play perfect baseball all year. You’re going to have to overcome mistakes. And certainly, everybody makes mistakes.

“So if you buy into taking care of your teammates and trying to pick them up in those situations, you just always keep giving yourself a chance.”

Cole’s chance: blowing away Gavin Lux with a 99 mph fastball for the first out, then getting superstar Shohei Ohtani – clearly compromised by his Game 2 shoulder injury – to swing through a knuckle-curve for the second out.

Somehow, the Yankees still led 5-0. Except a baseball truism hung over the entire affair.

“You can’t give a good team like that extra outs,” Judge said.

And yet here was the play to get out of it: Cole with a slider to Mookie Betts, a right-handed hitter, who squibbed it toward first. By the quality and execution of the pitch, Cole deserved to be out of a wacky inning unscathed. Instead, the fissures in the foundation became wide-open crevasses.

“Those balls off righties … are the hardest balls for us” said Anthony Rizzo, New York’s first baseman. There is spin involved. It is unpredictable.

Cole thought he might have Betts’ ball anyway.

“I took a direct angle to it to cut it off, because I just didn’t know how hard he hit it,” Cole said.

Yet by that point, the Yankees were rattled.

“Especially with what had transpired throughout the inning,” Rizzo said, “I kind of was going forward – and then it kicked one way, so I had to really make sure to catch it first. And looked up to flip and just …”

No one was there. Cole pointed for Rizzo to run to first. Except Cole wasn’t covering first. He looked, frankly, like he was headed to the dugout. He had done the hard part, getting Betts to hit a ball that should have been an out. He just didn’t do the easy part.

“I was not in position to cover first,” Cole said. “Neither of us were, based on the spin of the baseball and him having to secure it. Just a bad read off the bat.”

Hernández scored the first Dodgers’ run. The bases were still loaded. And Freeman – a terror all series, the indisputable MVP – came to the plate.

“You could just feel the excitement,” Freeman said.

Down in the count 1-2, Freeman fouled off a nasty change-up to stay alive. A lesser hitter would have flailed, and the Yankees would have led 5-1.

Instead, Freeman lived for the next pitch, a fastball. He sent it to center, where it found the grass. Edman and Smith both rounded third. Both had reached on errors. Both scored.

“When you’re given extra outs and you capitalize in that kind of game,” Freeman said, “that’s huge.”

Cleanup hitter Teoscar Hernández followed with a towering two-out, two-run double to center that tied the game at 5. The Yankees could – and did, afterward – argue that the fifth inning didn’t kill them, because they responded by taking a 6-5 lead in the sixth.

Don’t listen. Game 5 was granted, in the top of the fifth, to the Dodgers, who are too talented and too smart to look at the receipt and return the gift.

There will be a parade in Los Angeles, and it will be well-deserved.

But winter in the Bronx just got chillier by degrees. The Yankees had the Dodgers in an uncomfortable position, and they responded by fluffing the pillows and folding back the sheets. A 5-0 lead became a 7-6 loss, mostly because the Yankees couldn’t perform basic baseball tasks.

“Definitely,” said right fielder Juan Soto, “we thought we got ’em.”

Except they didn’t. Live with that till spring? No. Live with that for a lifetime.