Chicago ? That was a giant exhalation, a gale-strength sigh of relief, the storm after the deathly calm.

That was an end to seven games of drought and – who knows? – maybe some doubt. That was a six-run fourth inning. Where exactly did it come from? Does it matter? A man dying of thirst doesn’t wonder how the water cooler ended up in the middle of the desert.

Those seven games of pain aren’t gone, and they certainly aren’t forgotten, but the White Sox finally took a stand without nodding off on their feet. That’s called progress in these parts.

That they did it against Randy Johnson and his snarl and his 95 mph nastiness was no small thing. There were no small things in a 6-2 victory Sunday over the Yankees.

“The way it’s gone the last seven games, you could easily lay down against a guy like that because of who he is, what he’s done and who he plays for now,” said Paul Konerko, who was part of the Sox’s back-to-back-to-back home run riff in the fourth. “That tendency was there.

“But I could tell early on, like the first inning, that guys didn’t give a (expletive) about that. They were like, ‘Who cares? I don’t care who’s throwing. We’re going to win this game today or we’re going to go down swinging.’ I knew the attitude was better for some reason. Why it wasn’t there the last few days, who knows?”

In that fourth inning, Chris Widger swung at a high fastball he “had no business hitting” and watched it exit the playing field for a three-run homer. That’s the kind of “who-cares?” swing Konerko described. It goes against everything they’ve been taught, but the Sox need to stop caring so much.

It’s time to start relaxing and rebuilding. It’s time for the Sox to rebuild whatever was lost during that losing streak, whether it was confidence, sleep, muscle mass, innocence or whatever.

Sunday didn’t make everything all right, but perhaps it made the sky-is-falling moaners crawl out from under their desks for a moment. Jose Contreras shut down the Yankees over eight innings. All nine Sox hitters came to the plate in the fourth. Hope peeked through the man-made clouds.

Is it real? It says here it’s just as real as that seven-game losing streak. You don’t play 113 games at 35 games over .500 and then suddenly lose everything in a span of seven straight losses. Life doesn’t work that way, unless you’re Rick Ankiel or you possess the unfortunate combination of a gambling problem and rotten luck.

The losing streak was a dark reminder for the Sox that nothing will come easily. You didn’t think they needed to relearn that basic idea, but they did. You would have preferred the lesson had come in June. It came in August. Everybody needs to deal with that.

Manager Ozzie Guillen scorched his team publicly after Saturday’s loss, unlucky No. 7. It looked and sounded like a strategic message, and apparently it worked. After Sunday’s victory, Guillen said he had “a lot of confidence about this road trip,” which starts Tuesday night at Minnesota. It looked and sounded like good cop Ozzie telling his team to lighten up and have some fun.

It’s easy for him to make that subliminal suggestion when he has Freddy Garcia, Mark Buehrle and Jon Garland lined up to face the Twins. Guillen still maintains that the Sox can win with the bats they have now, but he knows they’ll need industrial-strength pitching down the stretch. This team has been about pitching and defense all year.

“There’s always going to be doubt,” Konerko said. “The question is, how much?”