I am devastated. Like a Boston Red Sox fan after losing the ALCS to the Yankees in 2003. Except keener. More intense. Deeper. Because my team has never won nothin’. Even the Red Sox have won the World Series — and did before the 2004 “miracle” edition.

We lost last night. We. Being Al Jazira Sports & Culture Club, of course. My neighborhood UAE Pro League team. The pride of all of us long-suffering Muroor homies.

First defeat of the season. And now we have fallen into second place in the standings.

An unbeaten season, our dream … dashed!

But since Al Jazira never wins anything (zero championships in league history) … we more than half expected things to go wrong in The Match of the Year. Which also happened to be the derby with Al Wahda. We expect this, Al Jazira fans do. If the worst is possible, it will happen. And it has.

Final score: Al Wahda 2, Al Jazira 1. At Al Wahda’s miserable little joke of a yard, barely four long blocks from our 40,000-capacity palace.

I didn’t go. And it’s perhaps as well I didn’t, because I would have been such an emotional wreck that I wouldn’t have wanted my co-workers to see me that way.

I saw the highlights (Highlights? Ha! What mockery!) and the guys from the office who were able to go … told me how it went down.

Great atmosphere, at the start. Place was nearly full. OK, it holds only 12,000, but still. Lots of noise, lots of excitement. A traffic jam getting to the yard.

Al Jaz was 10-0-3. Al Wahda was 11-2-0. Both had 33 points, tied atop the standings. So, not only neighborhood bragging rights at stake, first place in the league, as well.

What made this really painful is … that our leading scorer from last season, a Brazilian named Fernando Baiano, came back to haunt us. No, more than haunt us … to put a hatchet into our foreheads. Impale us on a spear, Freddy Krueger style. Make us rue the day we didn’t cough up the third year of the contract that he asked for at the end of last season. We offered him Dh30 million for two years –  about $8.1 million — and he turned it down. Think Roger Clemens leaving the Sawks for the Yankees. Except worse.

Baiano scored the first goal, and Al Wahda’s fans were going crazy. But Subait Khater, our gritty defensive midfielder, got us even in the 66th minute, and the red-and-black AJ diehards were rocking in the end zone we had been banished to by Al Wahda organizers. (At least we got in free. Al Jaz team officials handed out tickets while Al Wahda charged Dh10 ($2.70) to their fans. Proving that our sheikh (Hamdan) is cooler than theirs.

But just as we were plotting victory at Al Nahyan Stadium (where visitors never win, as everybody knows) … that Brazilian nightmare was back, heading a looping shot into the net, a goal that just eluded Adel Al Hosani, who was caught in no-man’s land.

How cruel. How very, very cruel.

So, with eight matches left, we’re down three points in the standings.

I don’t know if the lads will bounce back from this one. They’ve been shaky for a month-plus, and I figured they had to win this one because I don’t think we can catch the Wahdas — who haven’t lost since November. And now look like they’re on their way to their fourth league championship, and a spot in the Asian Champions League and all the other glory and bangles and praise that go with it, and we’re headed to another also-ran season.

I feel empty. Like my world had ended. When the hometown team loses like that … it’s just so hard.