NEW YORK -- The Seattle Mariners said it over and over this season while rising toward their American League-record 116 wins: It means nothing without a ring. As their win pile grew taller and taller their perch became only more precarious; falling from such a height would only hurt more.

The Mariners teetered against the Indians in the first round of the postseason. And in Game 5 of the ALCS they toppled before the Yankees, crashing down in a ghastly 12-3 loss at Yankee Stadium that left their dream season shattered in piece after piece all around them.

	Lou Piniella couldn't help but look at the ugly numbers on the scoreboard.

Over there was Aaron Sele, only hours before the AL's wins leader since 1998, with 69. But Monday he was just the starting pitcher who was as sharp as velvet, coughing up two home runs in four innings. He now owns an 0-6 career postseason record.

Over there was Mike Cameron, the sure-fire Gold Glove center fielder, stumbling and bumbling about the outfield like a three-legged newborn foal.

Over there was free-agent-to-be Bret Boone, the second baseman and AL MVP candidate thanks to an unfathomable .331-37-141 season, peeling off his Mariners uniform for perhaps the last time.

Over there was Ichiro Suzuki, the Japanese sensation who electrified baseball for six months, suddenly unplugged.

And over there was Lou Piniella, whose infamous proclamation that "We are going to come back here to play Game 6" became considerably less prescient than MacArthur's "I shall return."

Sure enough, when the Mariners return to Seattle they will do so with 116 wins as hollow as the zeroes that riddled their ALCS linescores.

"Any way you look at it, we lost," Cameron said about those 116 wins. "What we did in the regular season, we're not concerned about it. We didn't play our best baseball when we had to."

	0-for-October
	How the Mariners hit in the regular season compared to the postseason:
	Player	Rg season	Postseason
	Ichiro	.350	.421
	Cameron	.267	.226
	Boone	.331	.200
	Martinez	.306	.222
	Olerud	.302	.194
	Javier	.292	.227
	McLemore	.286	.156
	Wilson	.265	.179
	Guillen	.259	.250
	Bell	.260	.250

Sele was more direct: "Today they mean nothing, period."

The series pitted the 116-win Mariners against a considerable portion of the 1998 Yankees team that won 114, and whose record Seattle had broken. Experience prevailed. Experience asphixiated. Whenever Seattle showed signs of life New York piled on another clutch hit or walk or defensive play. In the end the Mariners were lifeless.

In Game 4 Sunday night, Seattle watched its 1-0 lead -- which it owned entering the bottom of the eighth, six outs from tying the series at two games apiece -- disappear with a stunning swiftness on home runs by Bernie Williams in the eighth and the game-winning shot by rookie Alfonso Soriano in the ninth. Monday night the Mariners spent two hours playing with the season all but over, its legs wiggling but the spider pulled apart.

Sele disintegrated after his third baseman, David Bell, couldn't handle Scott Brosius' sharply-hit groundball to open the third and was charged with an error. Soriano singled, affording the Yankees with the obvious move of bunting Chuck Knoblauch to put Derek Jeter at the plate with a chance to mount an early two-run lead. Jeter instead hit a sacrifice fly, leaving Sele with two outs and just a runner on second base.

But the run-scoring double Sele allowed to David Justice presaged the disaster immediately to follow. The Mariners right-hander relies on location because of his average-at-best fastball. When he put a decidedly less-than-average heater right over the plate to Bernie Williams, the Yankees' center fielder slammed it over the center-field fence for a two-run home run to give the defending champions a 4-0 lead. These were as earned as any unearned runs ever were.

"I went out and thought I located the fastball pretty good early in the game," Sele said. "The curveball was not there, basically, all game. But I just tried to counteract that with throwing some cut fastballs and some changeups. But the curveball wasn't there."

How good was the pitch to Justice? "Justice was a curveball middle of the plate that he hooked," Sele said. "He probably should have hit that out, too. Just got lucky that he hit it hard enough that he topped it."

Sele gave up another solo home run to Paul O'Neill before finishing the fourth inning down 5-0. To say lefty John Halama relieved him would be misleading: Though Halama retired the side in order in the fifth inning he gave up three straight singles to open the sixth, summoning another reliever, Joel Piniero, who after striking out Brosius gave up a walk, a single, another walk and another single to make the score 9-0 and sending the Yankee clubhouse kids scurrying to ice down the bubbly.

All season, the Mariners' top weapon was their stifling bullpen of Jeff Nelson, Arthur Rhodes, Norm Charlton and Kazuhiro Sasaki -- but usually when Seattle was ahead, which was numbingly often. On Monday those four pitchers sat on the bullpen bench all but useless, lying fallow for next season only.

The Mariners might have won 116 games this season, but the Yankees now have 179 in their luminous postseason history. Before the game Piniella scoffed at the so-called "Yankee Mystique" that is spoken of so reverently in the New York press, saying, "You know, they play human all summer, and then in postseason they turn it up a notch. But they can be beaten." Perhaps, but not by the Mariners. Now only the National League-champion Arizona Diamondbacks stand between the Yankees and their 27th World Series championship.

Piniella spoke to his team privately after the game and told them to be proud of their season despite the poor punctuation. "I congratulated them on a great season and I thanked them for the way they played for us, for me, and for this organization all year," Piniella said.

The talk made an impression on Charlton, who later described the regular season as "something we should be proud of. No one's ever done that in the American League. We won 116 games with class and dignity. We didn't show anybody up. We didn't act like a bunch of clowns. We didn't have guys get arrested. We played hard every game."

Yet most of the Mariners, only just realizing all their hopes that will go unmet, took little solace in a regular season that suddenly seems very long ago. Seattle jumped out to a virtually insurmountable lead in the AL West so quickly that few games had any tension from June on. Utilityman Mark McLemore denied that had any bearing on their lackluster performance in the playoffs.

"It had nothing to do with the Yankees beating us," he said. "We built the large lead, and we maintained the large lead when the A's were playing great. It had nothing to do with this series."

What did the Mariners in againt the Yankees was their poor offense, which had led the major leagues with 927 runs (5.72 per game) during the regular season despite the spacious dimensions of Safeco Field. Seattle scored just 22 runs in the five games against the Yankees, with Cameron (.176), Edgar Martinez (.150), McLemore (.143) and especially Suzuki (.222) all struggling.

"We knew coming in here we had to hit their starting pitching," Piniella said. "And I said for us to beat them, that we had to swing the bats against their top four. ... Once you allow their starting pitchers to pitch well, you're going to see (Mariano) Rivera, you are going to see (Ramiro) Mendoza, you are going to see (Mike) Stanton. It becomes a tough chore."

So tough as to undermine the most dominant regular season modern baseball has ever seen, a six-month display of speed, power, defense and pitching that once made the Mariners seem unbeatable. But beatable they became, quickly and unforgivingly.

"When can I enjoy the season?" McLemore asked. "I don't know. I've been on teams that lost 100 games in a season. It feels the same -- it sucks. Losing sucks."

Alan Schwarz is a senior writer for Baseball America and a regular contributor to ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com.