By the time the Yankees arrived at Fenway last August to deliver a shaming, historic five-game sweep, our most paranoid fears seemed to have been confirmed: Rather than a harbinger of decades of bountiful victories to come, the Red Sox’s glorious 2004 playoff run had been dumb luck, a mere hiccup in the never-ending series of soul-crushing indignities that is every Sox fan’s fate. The black plague of injuries that swept through the clubhouse in the final weeks of the season served only as a further, humbling reminder of what life used to be like, and what it looked to be becoming once again. At the end of the day, the second highest payroll in baseball bought us nothing except for third place in our division. (Behind a team from Canada!) We were right back where we had started: holding on for dear life…to the shit end of the stick.

Except now, we weren’t just upset. We had tasted victory, and it was sweet. What right did anyone have to take that away from us? What happened to the enlightened front office, the men and women who were going to lead our exultant march to the Promised Land?

Nothing, it turns out. After two seasons in which the ceaseless chatter that surrounded the team so often centered on what was going wrong—on the field, in the front office, wherever—we’re now talking about the epic potential of a lineup whose number three, four, and five hitters combined to hit 109 home runs and drive in 339 runs last season. And then there’s Daisuke Matsuzaka, baseball’s newest international idol, who judging from the hype should turn out to be a combination of Cy Young, Sandy Koufax, and God. Oh, and we did it all without giving up any of the team’s much heralded prospects. It’s a far cry from last year, when the biggest news was the addition of a man who shared his name with a breakfast cereal.

Surely it’s no accident that these moves are occurring during a time in which Theo Epstein and Larry Lucchino appear to have reached the kind of uneasy truce that allows them to focus on the team and not each other. The two men aren’t, to be certain, about to take any vacations together. What they have proved, though, is that they can work together when they need to—and their combined firepower can be pretty damn impressive. If all you’ve been focusing on are the individual headlines, you might have missed the bigger story. Put the pieces together, though, and there’s no denying it: The Red Sox have got their groove back.

In the half decade since John Henry and Tom Werner bought the team, public reaction to the owners (and the front office) has been ping-ponging between extremes. When the Sox didn’t bring Cliff Floyd back in 2003, they were cheapskates. When a bunch of garbage-heap pickups—Bill Mueller, David Ortiz, et al.—powered that season’s prodigious, record-setting offense, they were geniuses. Screwing up the A-Rod negotiations: moronic. Convincing Curt to come to Boston: brilliant. Alienating Nomar: inexcusable. Bringing in Orlando Cabrera and Dave Roberts: exemplary. Hell, in less than a year, the Edgar Renteria acquisition was evidence of the team’s sagacity and its stupidity.

Just on the basis of that brief history, you’d have thunk the team’s new leaders would have realized that, for all our promises that a single World Series win would bring endless goodwill, local reaction still will virtually always be dictated by whatever has transpired most recently. And yet somehow, beginning in 2005, the team’s executives actually made things worse. Larry Lucchino, perhaps the most creative CEO in baseball, continued to pursue his small-market pragmatism in a region that was already deeply in love with its local nine, amping up the team’s marketing efforts and thereby transforming the existing fever pitch into a full-on frenzy freckled by pink hats and $200 first dates on the Budweiser pavilion. (Rest assured that if there’s a way to monetize urinal cakes, the Sox will figure out what it is.) Meanwhile, Epstein, whose shrewdness belied his age, tried in vain to educate the team’s mushrooming fan base on the importance of a long-term game plan that favored less expensive young lions over brand-name all-stars whose best years are behind them.

All of which was a little confusing for your average sports-radio listener, who, let’s be honest, doesn’t have the longest attention span to begin with. Should we expect the world? Or focus on the future? Somehow, it seemed, the Sox thought they could up the ante and tamp down expectations at the same time. And if you don’t stay on message, as any good politician will tell you, you lose control of the story line.

The schism created by these dueling public relations strategies—one designed to keep the money flowing into the team’s coffers, the other an effort to give the team’s baseball ops crew the freedom to make decisions they were convinced would lead to enduring success—was on ample display in the days and weeks after the Red Sox’s three-and-out exit from the 2005 playoffs. Epstein left the team less than a month later largely due to strains in his relationship with Lucchino, and the notion that an unbridgeable philosophical gap regarding roster construction had been the cause of Epstein’s departure hardened into something approaching conventional wisdom.

That was never really what the problems were about, but no matter. When Epstein returned to the Sox early last year, those folks convinced that the two executives’ difficulties centered on whether to lard the team with expensive stars or stock it with scrappy pups couldn’t help but conclude it was the GM who’d come out on top. The Sox replaced 32-year-old folk hero Johnny Damon with the 26-year-old, publicity-averse Coco Crisp. Bronson “Saturn Nuts” Arroyo was swapped out for the 24-year-old Wily Mo Pena. And trade deadline deals that would have brought all-stars Roy Oswalt and Andruw Jones to Boston reportedly collapsed because the Sox were unwilling to give up the young pitching that the Astros and the Braves craved.

After the season went down the toilet, the snipers that constantly circle around the team took aim at Theo’s head, which served to only heighten the tension inside the front office. (Some of Epstein’s confidants are still stewing about an item that ran in the Herald last year in which an anonymous source said that Lucchino was gleefully laying the team’s struggles at Epstein’s feet, a juicy nugget that no one in the Sox camp ever really denied.) The focus was once again on what was going on inside the team’s Yawkey Way headquarters, which meant the organization’s full attention wasn’t directed toward what was happening on the field.

Not long before he left the Sox in October 2005, Epstein joked that the team famous for its high-wire playoff victories didn’t even start trying until it was down 0–2 in a series. According to a number of people with the club, during this past off-season the front office was gripped by some of the same resolute determination that comes when you’re staring elimination in the face...except this time elimination wasn’t a loss in the playoffs, it was the threat of fan rebellion.

Perhaps that’s why the team’s recent moves once again feel more like they’re coming from mission control than the morgue. This year’s full-court press on Daisuke Matsuzaka was more than a little reminiscent of 2003’s Thanksgiving wooing of Schilling, when Lucchino flew out to Arizona to illustrate the extent to which the organization could roll out the red carpet for marquee players, and Epstein and assistant GM Jed Hoyer sealed the deal with presentations that showed Schilling exactly what the Sox could accomplish.

But even with the team clicking on at least most, if not all, of its cylinders, there are, this being Boston, observers who are questioning its recent decisions. Indeed, when you add up the numbers, the Red Sox’s off-season spending amounts to a spree that would make a 24-year-old Wall Street millionaire set loose in a high-class skin joint blush. The Sox, after all, spent $209 million on just three players: Matsuzaka, J. D. Drew, and Julio Lugo. That’s $130 million more than the total off-season spending of the next highest American League team, and more than any club in baseball save for the Cubs and the Giants.

Considering that Drew and Lugo both turned 31 shortly after last season ended, and that Drew, as everyone from Bangor to Bristol now knows, is an injury-prone player with a reputation for being both diffident and soft, one way to interpret the team’s sudden spending is that Theo and his lieutenants in the Sox’s baseball ops crew have realized that in the hothouse atmosphere that defines baseball in Boston, there are times when you sure as hell better go all-in lest the locals turn truly nasty. But baseball, much like life, is never as cut and dried as we’d like, and it’d be wrong to look at the 2007 Red Sox and see a wholesale shift in philosophy on Theo Epstein’s or John Henry’s or Larry Lucchino’s or anyone else’s part. Epstein never wanted to turn the Sox into the East Coast version of the cash-strapped Oakland A’s; he wanted to hold on to the team’s up-and-comers expressly so the club could lay out the big bucks when high-impact free agents were available. (With baseball’s revenue-sharing program allowing even small-market teams to open their wallets, those difference-makers that do hit the open market are more expensive than ever.)

And once you get past the eye-popping sums of money being thrown around, the Sox’s big-ticket acquisitions actually fit quite nicely into the team’s reigning philosophy. Yes, $14 million a year for five years of J. D. Drew is a lot, especially compared with the $13 million per year that Johnny Damon is making for the next three seasons. But Drew also has the sixth highest on-base percentage of any player over the past three years—higher than both Manny and Ortiz—and is, at least according to Bill James (a guy who knows a thing or three about baseball), the best defensive outfielder in the game. As for Dice-K, Boston’s newest $100 million man, he’s exactly the type of guy the Henry-Werner Red Sox have always lusted after: a 26-year-old stud who should be entering the prime of his career. (When Pedro got his $90 million deal, plenty of people thought that was a big risk, as well…and that didn’t work out all that badly.) And by the way, the Sox can afford his steep price tag precisely because they’re also stocked with guys like Jonathan Papelbon, Jon Lester, Manny Delcarmen, and Craig Hansen, who combined made less than $2 million last year. Even if all these moves blow up in the team’s face, they’re the types of risks that make sense…unlike, say, the $55 million the Royals shelled out for Gil Meche, a mediocre (at best) starter who’s had an ERA above 5.00 in two of the past three seasons.

After three years in which the Sox’s payroll stayed between $120 million and $130 million, the ’07 team will cost upward of $150 million; the Yankees, meanwhile, will see their payroll drop for the second year in a row. There’s still tens of millions of dollars separating the two teams—certainly nothing to sneeze at—but it’s getting harder and harder for the Sox to cry poverty when explaining why they didn’t make this or that move. All it took was one World Series win for the Fenway Faithful’s mindset to shift from one that always expected disaster to one that felt entitled to perpetual success, and fielding what’s arguably the hardest-hitting lineup and most hyped rotation in the game isn’t exactly going to lessen the pressure to win. Buckle up, kids. Whatever happens, it’s gonna be a helluva ride. At least now it looks like the folks in the driver’s seat are all headed in the same direction.

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