Red Sox Nation rejoice: Paps heads back to pen

Maybe it was the lucky green jersey that changed Boston's fortunes in the pen (Globe/AP)

Being a Red Sox fan, it's inherently in our nature to start worrying when the planets align and too many things seem to be going our way.

RSN, start worrying.

As if the apparent coup of signing Dice-K for only $100 mil (maybe Borass wasn't so crazy after all, eh?), adding the pop of Lugo's & Drew's bats to the lineup and having Schill around to anchor the rotation for at least this season wasn't enough to send the Nation back to 2004 perma-grin levels, now we get word that our beloved Jonathan Papelbon has decided he wants to close again.

That's right, despite an entire offseason of hearing everyone from Theo to Tito to Paps himself swear up & down that he not only would join the starting rotation to relive stress on his balky right shoulder, but that he wanted to do so was utter BS.

How do we know this? Because today Paps, last year's AL Rookie of the Year runner-up, admitted "I want to close the rest of my career."

I repeat, start worrying.

This can't be happening. Every single member of RSN, including the few who tried to drink the Kool aid about Paps becoming a starter, has dreamed that we would hear him utter words like that. This guy was an absolute animal as a rookie closer, one of the best ever and a ROY front-runner until his September shutdown, and when we heard him talk about how it would be better for his career to return to the rotation, we believed him, but nobody wanted it to be true.

Of course many of us lamented that despite Boston's killer starting rotation (Schill, Dice, Wake, Paps and Gopher), the bullpen was the Achilles heel for this potential World Series contender. Let's put it this way: it would have been virtually impossible to win a title with Mike Methuselah Timlin, Gas Can Tavarez, Joel Shy Guy Piniero or Can't Hit the Black Donnelly closing games.

Now our prayers have been answered. In this article by Edes in today's Globe, you can read glorious quotes like this from the man himself and then you can start worrying why things are going so cosmically, karmically good for our Sawx right now.

"This is something that I would like to do for the rest of my career and kind of just forget about starting and go out there and chase records and . . . hopefully what [Mariano] Rivera has done for the Yankees, I can do with the Sox."

Let the hand-wringing commence!

Oh, BTW, the fact that the Pats are all of a sudden stockpiling quality free agents like Bush stockpiles haters?

Start worrying, Patriot Nation.