America’s Cup is won by Kiwis in a 7-1 rout

Redemption for a gutty crew of five New Zealanders and one Australian was reached on the turquoise waters of Bermuda’s Great Sound, four years and 3,000 miles removed from one of the most brutal collapses in sports.

With a mixture of ingenuity and national pride, Emirates Team New Zealand got back up after taking a gut punch for the ages, came to the Bermuda Triangle and ripped the America’s Cup right out of tech tycoon Larry Ellison’s hands.

“We’re on top of the world,” helmsman Peter Burling said Monday after steering the Kiwis’ incredibly fast 50-foot foiling catamaran to the clinching victory in a 7-1 rout of two-time defending champion Oracle Team USA.

Burling, 26, is the youngest helmsman to win sailing’s greatest prize in a competition that dates to 1851.

The only non-Kiwi on the crew is Glenn Ashby, a 39-year-old Australian, multihull wiz and Olympic silver medalist who serves as skipper and controls the space-age wingsail with an Xbox-like device.

There were no Americans on Oracle Team USA’s crew, which included five Australians and one from Antigua.

It was sweet atonement for the Kiwis. In 2013 on San Francisco Bay, Team New Zealand, then led by Dean Barker, reached match point at 8-1. Oracle then staged one of the biggest comebacks in sports, winning eight straight races to retain the Auld Mug.