While I can't say I've been following the whole Theo Epstein saga very much, there are four things I think I've taken from it.

1. Using the Star Wars paradigm, Larry Lucchino is Darth Vader rather than Obi Wan Kenobi to Theo's Luke Skywalker.

2. While it's pretty senseless to get worked up over a GM - not that it's stopping anyone here, as, like Jello, there's always room for Red Sox melodrama - the likely candidates to replace Theo are, in a word, underwhelming. The two names that seem to crop up a lot are Towers - a Lucchino crony who had spent the last decade shaping the baseball force that is the San Diego Padres - and DiPodesta, who spent a jillion dollars to shape the Los Angeles Dodgers into a team that couldn't overtake the Padres if it had sails and a favorable gale.

Of course, the way these things seem to be going there's a 23 year old economics grad from Stanford who will be offered the job in a couple of weeks.

3. Perhaps the biggest (only?) winner in all of this is the Boston Herald, which has dedicated increasing numbers of column inches to the role of the Boston Globe, the local paper of record and minor stakeholder in the Red Sox, in this fiasco. I can't say I'm a big fan of the Herald's descent into becoming the New York Post's second cousin, but times like these does illustrate the beauty of being a two-paper town.

4. Regardless of all of this, people will still be paying a boatload of cash in 2006 to see a team you could have seen for a fraction of a price in 2005 when the players were in Pawtucket and Portland. There's a certain chutzpah in a team like the Red Sox going into a youth movement, almost a dare that fans won't pay $75 to see the Yawkey Way version of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. Though it's not much of a dare, as the owners know that fans will blink.

Good thing hockey is back; it'll give me something to focus on until mid-June. Not that the Bruins will be playing that late.