My favorite part of clinching celebrations during the Yankees dynasty years was waiting for the first player amid the flowing champagne to offer a “No one believed in us.”

That would allow me to retort, “Yep, no one believed in the team with the highest payroll, most stars and all this championship history.”

I get that it has become embedded in the modern sports lexicon to play this card no matter the size of the overdog saying it. All winners are going to talk about overcoming adversity like they climbed the Matterhorn in flip-flops while ignoring that every team in every sport and, thus, every playoff team and champion has to overcome the injury, underperformance and internal strifes endemic to a season.

I am only pointing this out because I think the Yankees of Gerrit Cole, Aaron Judge and a $300 million-plus payroll are about to try to play the “us versus the naysayers” mantra. To this, Marcus Stroman, whose two-year. $37 million deal with the Yankees became official Wednesday, is ideal. Because when it comes to chips on the shoulder and voicing the “no one believed in me” script, there is no one quite like this first-round draft pick out of Duke.

Let that be repeated: A first-round draft pick out of Duke playing the no one believed in me card as if they were a 37th-round pick out of Colby (Kansas) Community College. Love it.

Anyway, I actually think that the Yankees’ worst season in three decades has the organization feeling aggrieved and picked on. When their GM is publicly calling just about every criticism of his team and his administration bull(bleep), it speaks to Brian Cashman’s feistiness and also to a franchise that has done so well for so long not exactly knowing how to absorb these body blows.

It also led to the Yankees going to their safe space this offseason: paying what they must in prospects (Juan Soto) or dollars (Yoshinobu Yamamoto) to collect stars. Except Yamamoto did not take their money, which ultimately can buy a lot but can’t change geography when the pitcher preferred the West Coast (Dodgers).

The Yankees did not like the starting pitching prices elsewhere enough to budge, notably on Blake Snell or in trade for Dylan Cease. So they turned to Stroman, who somewhere within scrubbing a quarrelsome social media history and having dinner in Tampa with Aaron Boone and partaking in a couple of phone calls with other influential Yankees personnel convinced club decision-makers that he could be trusted to keep the focus on winning and his performance.

To that, perhaps, Stroman could offer no one believed in him — at least no one outside the employ of the Yankees, who over the years have talked themselves into (among others) A.J. Burnett and Joey Gallo and Josh Donaldson and Carlos Rodon, when there was an awful lot of evidence that it was a bad idea.