Three and a half years ago, on a handful of quintessential October evenings for playoff baseball at Fenway Park, the Red Sox proved something extraordinary. What started as a takedown of the Yankees in the glorious single game win-or-go home Wild Card playoff format, and then continued as a brief but breathtaking run deep into the ALCS, ultimately blossomed into a foreshadowing fortnight.

Despite their seemingly unquestionable demise, the Red Sox weren’t dead! And no, I don’t mean the 2021 Red Sox season. That organism ultimately croaked at the end of the two-week Cinderella run. But before they turned back into a pumpkin, they left breadcrumbs behind that revealed something far more consequential: The Red Sox as a regional phenomenon were alive and well!

Dormant? Sure. About to go fully back into hibernation again for a couple more last place finishes? Sadly, yes. But they were alive nonetheless; just waiting for a more proper moment to strike in full.

How do we know this? Because looking back, perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the October 2021 Red Sox is the way captured the region’s attention in a way many thought was no longer possible 17 years removed from 2004.

The game against the Yankees did a 19.8 in Boston, and remains the most watched baseball broadcast on ESPN so far this century. In the days that followed the Yankee elimination party, the Red Sox were the toast of the town, leading sports talk radio shows and capturing the attention of entire groups at parties. It was like stepping into a time machine, or seeing a long lost friend you thought you’d never cross paths with again.

More impressively, all of this occurred in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, where sports ratings in general were down and everything on the field seemed less important. This occurred after four last place finishes in the previous ten seasons. This occurred five years after David Ortiz’s retirement. And it occurred a mere two days after Tom Brady returned to Gillette Stadium to play his final game in Foxboro on October 3rd.

This was an unsuccessful playoff run surrounded by a sea of suppressing circumstances, and still, the region was momentarily mesmerized. That only happens if the Boston baseball craze was dormant, and not dead.

Baseball, especially Red Sox baseball, is volcanic.

It can trick fools into believing it’s fully dead, and then, after years of inactivity, all of a sudden its shooting magma 15 miles into the atmosphere. It very quickly goes from the thing nobody cares about, to the thing nobody can stop talking about.

The Red Sox volcano tends to go dormant every 30 years or so, as evidenced by the early 1930s, the early 1960s, the early 1990s, and the early 2020s. But it always faithfully erupts again to dazzle and enthrall a new generation; and that’s noteworthy because this spring, for the first time in a long time, there’s significant seismic activity coming from the mountainside.

One thing I can’t get over from this winter is how much potential star power the Red Sox are going to have again. It’s a complete reversal of the recent script, where as recently as 2023 they had Corey Kluber taking the mound on Opening Day and not a single man on the roster able to post a 4.0 WAR season.

Offseason acquisitions Alex Bregman and Walker Buehler bring lively championship pedigrees to the clubhouse. Garrett Crochet resembles an apex predator on the mound, and Aroldis Chapman provides a lightning rod of controversy from the closer’s spot. Then you factor in Jarren Duran growing into a star, Trevor Story possibly being healthy for a full season, and Tristin Casas, who has perfected making people born before 1970 angry getting more playing time, and the roster is completely transformed. And all of this is before you add three of the most exciting young prospects in all of baseball in Kristian Campbell, Marcelo Mayer, and Roman Anthony.

That is a LOUD roster! I don’t know if they’re going to win the race in the AL East, but the Red Sox went from driving a Honda Civic to a Corvette real quick. This group is going to be flashy. This group is going to be competitive, and this group is going to get people to emote.

Almost any way you slice it, this is the squad that’s going to truly flip the switch for good and make baseball matter again in Boston in a way it hasn’t in a long, long time. An entire generation of young fans who are too young to remember 2004 are about to catch the fever and fall in love with this sport in a way they didn’t even know was possible. This is going to be their team, and their journey starts today.

But before we fully go forward, I’d like to flashback one more time to our foreshadowing fortnight. Because if you believe in the baseball gods, this is a piece of connective tissue only they could provide.

When that 2021 group momentarily caught fire and briefly streaked into our lives like a comet across the October sky, it started when Nathan Eovaldi took the ball for the Sox and delivered a scoreless top of the first, setting the stage for this in the bottom of the inning:

Two Tuesday’s later, it ended with Nathan Eovaldi once again on the mound and unable to get out of a jam in the top of the ninth inning in Game 4 of the ALCS. The moment Laz Diaz missed a strike call that would have ended the inning and given the Sox a chance to walk it off to the tune of a 3-1 series lead, the genie went back into the bottle, and we haven’t seen it since.

But today, as Sox fans rightfully smile looking at the pitching match up because Garrett Crochet’s name is there, they should also smile for another reason. When the first pitch is thrown, dawning this new era of Red Sox baseball, it won’t be coming out of Garrett Crochet’s hand. Instead, it will be delivered by Nathan Eovaldi of the Texas Rangeres.

Once again, he’ll be the guy on the mound when the switch is flipped. Only this time, it’s going to last much longer than a couple of weeks. Just as it did in the late 30s, the late 60s and the late 90s after years slumber, Boston’s baseball volcano is about to erupt again!