It’s amazing what one championship every 86 years can do to soothe the soul.

Maybe I was just in a part of town with a high concentration of Zoloft users, but there was hardly a sense of panic following yesterday’s 14-2 embarrassment.

To what can we attribute this? Well, winning it all last year certainly gave Red Sox fans a chance to exhale. They don’t take every loss as life and death as they did before.

The way the Sox won last year helps, too. They were down 3-0 to the Yankees last year after losing 19-8. Being down 1-0 to the Chicago White Sox, even in a short five-game series, doesn’t seem so ominous.

Don’t think for a moment that complacency has set in. Sox fans were still mad last night, and justifiably so. Most of the anger was geared towards manager Terry Francona and his unwillingness to get Matt Clement out of the game.

Tito’s reluctance to pull Clement when it was plain to even Grady Little that he just didn’t have it yesterday left fans a lot of time to contemplate the ridiculous. Myself, I came up with a multiple choice question:

Terry Francona couldn’t take Matt Clement out of yesterday’s game until he’d given up eight runs because:

A) He was waiting for Chris Berman to put his hair piece back on.

B) He was locked in the dugout bathroom

C) Geraldo hadn’t flown in and started his live remote pleading for help, yet.

D) Calvin Schiraldi needed more time to warm up.

Some Francona apologists would have us add an E) to those choices, that the manager couldn’t pull Clement because he hasn’t been able to trust his bullpen all year. They’ll point out that Jeremi Gonzalez and Bronson Arroyo, who would have been most fans’ first choice to relieve Clement earlier, combined to give up six runs in a little over three innings. Somehow I doubt Arroyo would have pitched so poorly if the game hadn’t already been decided. And even if he did, how does that excuse leaving Clement in.

One might argue that it was a moot point anyway, because Chicago starter Jose Contreras was dominant once he got settled in. The last five words of that sentence are the key, of course.

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I went into this game thinking the key would be who would implode first, Clement or Contreras.

Clement clearly was the winner of that contest because his command of the strike zone was worse than our president’s command of the English language from the get-go. But the Red Sox have come back from bigger deficits than the 5-0 hole he had dug them into after two innings, and it wasn’t like Contreras was lights out from the start. Damon led off the game with a rocket to first, where Paul Konerko made a nice stab. Boston had seven hits through four innings and had cut the lead to 6-2 in the fourth.

If Francona hadn’t left Clement in to give up a six spot up to that point, or sent him back out in the bottom of the fourth to give back the two runs the Sox got in the top of the frame, who knows how Contreras would have reacted or whether he would have settled in as he did? He’s shown in the past to have a rather shaky psyche, and Boston knows that and has exploited it in the past.

They didn’t get much of a chance to test Contreras yesterday because Francona was afraid he would hurt Clement’s own psyche if he pulled him early and tax his bullpen in the process. Yet, he still managed to do both.

Hey, maybe it just wasn’t the Red Sox day yesterday. I suspect David Wells will come up big tonight and we’ll all forget Game 1.

But if we get to Game 5 and Matt Clement is on the mound, last year is going to be the last thing on my mind. It will be time to panic.

Randy White house is a staff writer. He can be reached at [email protected]