It's New York, New York

"Exciting? Families are going to be divided by this. Brother against brother, father against son," boomed the city's exuberant mayor, Rudy Giuliani, himself a pinstriped Yankee fan but happy to sell the whole thing as a chance for New York "to be even more arrogant than usual".

"It's going to better than sex," one daft doctor told the New York Post, while you could imagine Woody Allen having a field day with the sort of guff being spouted by psychologists agonising over Freudian and Oedipal aspects of the Series and warning direly of "fans' silent fears".

"For a lot of Mets fans, the Series could tap into some of the indignities of growing up - struggling against the more powerful team, the father, the older brother, the schoolyard bully," Dr Phil Lee, a Manhattan psychiatrist explained gravely in the NY Times.

"For Yankee fans, there is the fear that their powers are waning and that the young gunslingers will push them out of the way."

Good grief. It could only happen in New York.

The angst-ridden theory is that blue collar Mets' fans, so used to being considered NY's afterthought by the Yankees, even when they had had their moments as World Series winners in 1969 and 1986, could not cope with being put once and for all in their place by the aristos and that the Yankees' faithful, ready to celebrate a third straight Series triumph, could not bear the humiliation of defeat by the team they love to celebrate.

Joe Torre, the Yankees' famous manager, said: "I hope people behave themselves because it's going to split a few families up, I think."

As a lad, he had been at the last subway affair in 1956 when Don Larsen pitched the fabled "perfect game" to swing the Series for the Yankees against the Dodgers.

That was a Series which brought together Mantle, Yogi Berra and Jackie Robinson, names which have passed fondly into sepia-tinted legend. Those were the days before the sport was infected by labour strikes and steroids, days when it was perhaps a more simple pleasure. Torres said: "It was crazy then. But much more crazy now."

According to worried US TV executives, though, the rest of the nation won't see it that way and will find New York's preening as a turn-off. Yet Todd Macklin, Channel 5's splendid summariser who will be guiding British night owls through live coverage of the Series, begs to differ.

He believes the Yankees, who have been playing inferior ball, may still find a way of prevailing as usual but reckons that, in the greater scheme of things, the result is almost incidental.

He said: "I think the whole event almost supercedes the Series itself because the spectacle will be so extraordinary, something unique in the modern game, that probably even the cynics will be irresistibly drawn in to watching."

New Yorkers won't mind who else peers in because it's their party. When they pile on the train - a whopping one buck fifty these days - to see if the Mets' colossus Mike Piazza can belt Roger Clemens, the grizzled old pride of the Yankees, out of the ball park - or get clocked on the batting helmet as he did when they clashed in July - it's gonna be titanic, just like the good old days, they say. Start spreading the news . . .

Channel 5's live coverage of the best-of-seven Series begins on Sunday morning at 12.05am