Boston ? Gary Sheffield didn’t show as much restraint as he was trying to tell everyone Thursday night after his incident with a fan at Fenway Park. He took what amounted to a swinging swipe at a fan who made contact with Sheffield as he was going for a ball and was lucky the fan backed up out of reach.

But at least he wasn’t Ron Artest.

In fact, Sheffield said he thought of Artest as the incident unfolded, and that kept him from leaping the low railing and going into the stands after the fan.

“That’s the first thing that came to my mind,” Sheffield said. “That’s why I didn’t react. I thought about the consequences.”

He should have thought sooner, because even though Sheffield maintained that he didn’t throw a punch, the tape shows that he took a full-blown swipe at the fan, before he even threw the ball back into the infield.

Can’t do that — more so than ever after the infamous basketball brawl in November in which Artest attacked fans in the stands at The Palace of Auburn Hills, Mich.

But if Sheffield was wrong, just to a lesser degree than Artest, the fan was just as wrong, and so too are the Red Sox in this latest mess.

After all, that right-field corner has been an incident waiting to happen, especially as the intensity in this Yankees-Red Sox rivalry has become so heightened the last couple of years.

Because the railing is so low out there, fans have easy access to balls that go into the corner — and right fielders, as well. At the very least, the Sox should have an army of security people out there manning that wall, making sure fans don’t interfere.

Better yet, the Sox ought not to sell those front-row seats, at least when the Yankees are in town, if they want to prevent something like this.

After all, there always are idiots in the crowd, and though it’s hard to tell if the fan meant any harm to Sheffield, he had no business swinging his arm over the fence — even if it was only in the hope of grabbing Jason Varitek’s triple as it rocketed along the wall.

By doing so, the tape showed him making contact with Sheffield. How hard he hit him was hard to tell, and certainly it didn’t look like it was as hard as Sheffield indicated when he said he “got punched in the mouth.”

But then again, it had to be jarring for Sheffield to get hit in the face when he wasn’t expecting it, as he concentrated on trying to field the ball. That doesn’t excuse Sheffield from turning and taking his two-handed swipe at the fan, especially before he threw the ball back. But after Sheffield turned and threw the ball to the infield, it did look for a minute as if he was going to jump that railing and go after the guy.

But he stopped himself at the wall and gestured instead of going in. For that, he does deserve at least some credit.

“I was getting ready to do something,” he said. “But I held my composure.”

Chances are, major-league baseball officials won’t agree that he held it enough. The two-handed swipe almost surely will cost him a suspension of some kind, simply because sports commissioners have to demonstrate zero tolerance for such actions — especially because of what happened in Detroit.

In the end, however, what everyone will remember is that Sox fans proved they could be idiots themselves, and Sheffield took a swipe at one. He’ll pay a price for it, but the Red Sox need to take action so it doesn’t happen again.