Enjoy it now, Red Sox fans.

Enjoy it tonight, when the announcers on ESPN or NESN or wherever you catch the game refer to your “World Champion Boston Red Sox.”

Enjoy it next Monday, when the players dare Alex Rodriguez to slap the rings off their fingers and Boston’s first championship banner in 86 years is unfurled at Fenway Park.

Enjoy it, my fellow Red Sox fans, because it’s going to be down hill from there.

The 2004 post-season was like a once-in-a-lifetime trip to a five-star restaurant for Red Sox fans. The ALCS was like the main course, the World Series dessert. While Yankee fans ate crow, Sox fans, knowing we’d never been there before and may never be there again, stuffed ourselves on roast leg of lamb.

We didn’t have any room for dessert, but we still ate the chocolate mousse, even though we knew we wouldn’t savor it like we would on any emptier stomach. The World Series wasn’t nearly as sweet as we’d anticipated, because we still hadn’t digested what happened in the ALCS. When it was all over, we were more content than at any point in our lives, and we certainly weren’t going to be hungry again for a long time.

Well, the Red Sox overindulged more than the fans this off-season. Curt Schilling hobbled onto practically every talk or reality (poker) show he could. Johnny Damon wrote a book between magazine cover photo shoots. Kevin Millar was a regular on The Best Damn Sports Show Question Mark. Terry Francona was a guest on Conan O’Brien’s show.

The Sox were national media darlings this winter and it has carried over into the spring. The crew from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy paid a visit to Fort Myers, not that there’s anything wrong with that. They’re on virtually every magazine cover this week and ESPN is giving them more air time than CNN is to the Vatican.

That’s all fine by me. They deserve whatever accolades, gigs, book deals and endorsements they get. Heck, I give all of them credit for reporting to spring training in shape.

But it’s obvious that these guys are a little too satisfied with themselves, professionally and personally. Any day now, some of them will be brushing teammates off for book signings and talk show appearances this season, and I fear that will be a negative to the chemistry that was so important to this team last year, particularly if they have a mediocre three month stretch like they did last year.

And chances are pretty good that they’ll have one of those prolonged stretches this year. Why? Because the starting rotation has too many question marks, and if Red Sox fans learned one thing last year, it’s all about the pitching.

Start with Curt Schilling, who’s coming off ankle surgery. Yeah, he’s a pro and a warrior and all that, but he’s also 37 years old. I was relieved that he didn’t push himself to make it back for tonight’s game because that would have been rushing it, but how do we know how quick or thorough his recovery is?

Even if he’s still a stud, he’s not matching last year’s 21-win season, which means the rest of the staff already has to pick up some of the slack from its leader.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure about how much weight the rest of them can pull. David Wells, speaking of weight, is 41 and every day looks more and more like the diabetic uncle who always wanted you to pull his finger. Matt Clement could either finally harness his dominating stuff and blossom into a No. 2 starter or he could implode. There seems to be no in-between.

Tim Wakefield is what he is, a valuable guy to have on your staff but basically a .500 pitcher. Some people have Bronson Arroyo pegged for a breakout year, but mark my words, the guy will never be more than a five-inning pitcher. Someday, management will smarten up and give him the role he’s meant for, and would be pretty good at – middle reliever.

Wade Miller was a nice pick-up, a former 16-game winner who came fairly cheap. But he came cheap for a reason. He’s got a bad rotator cuff. Ramon Martinez came to the Red Sox with the same thing and pitched in 31 games over two seasons.

Sorry folks, but the Yankees’ pitching is clearly superior with the additions of Randy Johnson and Carl Pavano. They didn’t have a true No. 1 starter last year. Now they do, and he’s arguably the best No. 1 in the game.

Pitching wins championships. Historically, the Yankees have known that better than the Red Sox, year in and year out. Last year, George Steinbrenner for some reason decided it was time to try another way, and everybody went ga-ga over his All-Star lineup. But when it came down to crunch time, the Sox could turn to Curt Schilling and Derek Lowe, and the Yankees could turn to Jon Lieber and the ever-fragile Kevin Brown and Javier Vazquez. Now, Johnson trumps Schilling, Lowe is gone and so is Vazquez, and Brown will be burried so deep in the bullpen that he won’t see the mound when it counts.

New York will win the division by eight games because the Yankees are hungrier and have better pitching. The Sox will get the wild card again (only because the rest of the American League is so weak after Minnesota and Anaheim) and get knocked out in the first round because Schilling and Wells will be too worn down and Clement and the others will be too unreliable.

Now, if Randy Johnson throws out his back tonight, all bets are off. But that would just make us all a little too giddy, don’t you think?