I may no longer be New York’s number one public servant — as I was on the day our city was attacked in the most disgusting act of mass murder our country has ever known — but I’ll always be the number one fan of the greatest baseball team in the history of the world, the New York Yankees.

I’ve loved the Yankees since I was a little boy. I hoarded every Joe DiMaggio bubblegum card I could find. My friends and I took the subway up to the Bronx every chance we could. Nobody cheered harder for Mickey and Whitey and Yogi, and if a kid wearing a Dodgers cap happened to wander into our neighborhood, well, you better believe we jumped him. You had to be a tough little SOB to be a kid in those days. I remember one boy who I went to school with, a Brooklyn fan, loved to go on and on about Mantle, calling him “Mick the Hick,” and all that. Just so happens, his family’s liquor store burned down one night, and he and his Mom and his Dad had to live on the street ’til the social workers came and took him away. Hey, they weren’t called the Bums for nothing!

All of which is why it’s so difficult for me to hear these vicious, hurtful rumors swirling around about the four World Series rings I own, one for each of the Yankees’ four World Championships during my term as Mayor.

The “controversy” apparently stems from the fact that I haven’t paid taxes on these rings, which are collectively worth roughly $200,000. And in the “technical sense,” that’s true. I haven’t paid taxes on them. But for reasons that are 100% justified and probably not strictly speaking illegal.

In 1996, the Yankees won their first World Series in almost twenty years. Now you know, for all of us who grew up in the 1940s and 50s, the idea of going twenty years without a World Championship was literally like a vision of Hell. So when Charlie Hayes squeezed that pop-up for the final out, I guarantee you, no one in that stadium was thinking about the taxes they had to pay on their World Series rings, except possibly Darryl Strawberry. Even next season, when George Steinbrenner and Joe Torre themselves handed me my ring as a show of gratitude for all I had done for the city, the incredible warmth generated by that fantastic comeback victory over the Braves… you could still feel it in the streets of New York. I wasn’t about to sully that magical moment for our city by putting a price tag on our collective joy.

In 1998, the Yankees won 114 games, then steamrolled the Rangers, Indians and Padres to win the Championship in the most dominant fashion since Babe Ruth wore pinstripes. This was the greatest team that any of us have seen in our lifetimes, the gold standard of modern baseball. And when you’re that dominant, some rules just don’t apply. Tax rules, for instance. I admit it: I personally told every member of that team that they didn’t have to pay taxes on their World Series rings. Because when you win more baseball games in a single year than any team ever, you get to write your own ticket in some respects. So when I received my souvenir ring from the ’98 team, I wasn’t about to show them up by paying taxes on it myself.

In 1999, the Yankees again dominated the post-season, going 11-1 on the way to another World Championship over the Braves. God as my witness, I literally did not realize that I had a World Series ring from this season. I have no memory of receiving one, and if George and Joe and Brian had offered me one as a gift, I would have turned it down multiple times before accepting in order to spare them any embarrassment. But according to our inventory, I apparently have one. The only conclusion I can reach is that the ring was included in a suitcase of memorabilia that Bernie Kerik dropped off at Gracie Mansion one night, asking me to “just hold onto it for a little while,” which of course I did. And of course, less than two years later, our city was struck by the terrible events of September 11th. And after that day, all New Yorkers learned that there were far, far more important things than who might have asked whom to hold onto what, for whatever reason.

In 2000, the Yankees prevailed over the Mets in the first “Subway Series” the city had seen since my boyhood, and it did not disappoint, with the Yankees prevailing in five closely-fought games. When George and Joe presented me with my 2000 ring” that one I remember, because I tell you, it’s really a beauty, with a diamond the size of my son Andrew” I carefully weighed the pros and cons of declaring it on my tax returns. And while reporting the gift might have been the “by-the-book” option, I had other things to consider, namely, the fact of the Subway Series.

As Mayor, I always had to walk a delicate line. While I was and am an unabashed Yankee fan, in my public capacity, I’m also the Mayor of the Mets, as well. And while I may have suspected that Bobby Valentine was a deeply amoral and despicable human being, and that Turk Wendell was a goddamn ferret-loving freak, they were still my citizens. And so while I can delight in the Yankees’ victory and ride in their victory parades as a fan, I have to be more circumspect as Mayor. Had I declared that 2000 ring on my taxes, wouldn’t it have been a slap in the face to the Mets, who already had suffered the misfortune of encountering an incomparably better team in the World Series? I wasn’t about to put it down in black and white that “New York is a Yankees city! Screw you, Mets!” Because we’re all New Yorkers. And that’s a fact that was never driven home so fully as on that horrible morning when we watched those burning bodies plummeting from our raped and wounded” but still beloved” Twin Towers.

So no, I haven’t paid taxes on those rings. And I’m not going to. Because the Yankee pride they represent belongs to all of us. As a city, we’ve paid enough already, in blood and tears and misery and medical costs from all the lung cancer. (I swear, the best knowledge we had said that the air around the site was safe; Bernie Kerik oversaw the study himself.) I’m not going to let the Village Voice and Al Qaeda win this round.

So let’s go Yankees in 2007. And God help us should we ever be attacked again, particularly at a time when we’re vulnerable and exposed by my absence from public office. Because who knows how great the devastation might be, besides me?

Rudy Giuliani dresses like a total slut, and is running for President.