Members of the 2004 Red Sox paraded around Fenway Park prior to Tuesday night's game against the Rays, offering a nostalgic look back on arguably the greatest season in franchise history as the end of one of the worst nears. 

There was something brilliant about the construction of that team, of course. By the end of the year, after the midseason deals that reshaped the roster, the Sox had a 25-player roster that featured distinct but complementary skill sets, a group of players that meshed seamlessly both on and off the field. 

"It was a unit that literally hung out together and ate together and liked each other. That doesn’t go on. You can’t buy that," Kevin Millar reflected. "We had so many different guys, from Billy Mueller to Trot Nixon to Pedro Martinez to crazy-ass Manny Ramirez to Keith Foulke, who had every coolest car in the world and cool little gadget thing to Fake Cowboy Millar to David Ortiz. The group, it was a group. That was the one thing, coming back now and seeing everything, you remember the tightness. We weren’t the best players. We had a few superstars in Pedro and Manny, but we were the best unit, if that makes sense.”

Yet as much as that 2004 team was a stroke of brilliance in the assembly -- a fact reflected in the World Series title that year, ending a drought of four score and six years -- its disassembly was perhaps just as brilliant. 

After that World Series, the Red Sox dispensed of nostalgia for later dates (such as Tuesday night). The team made calculated decisions about how to reload for the future. That was most notable in the case of Pedro Martinez, once the central building block in a first title run.

Martinez was permitted to walk in free agency, with the Sox declining to match the Mets' four-year, $52 million offer. At the time, the Sox saw a 32-year-old pitcher whose best days had passed, and whose health was likely to decline. 

It was difficult to replace the three-time Cy Young winner, of course. The effort to let Martinez (and Derek Lowe) depart via free agency resulted in a multi-year transition, with replacements such as Matt Clement struggling to fill the void. 

But in walking away from Martinez, the Sox freed themselves to move on, to create a new nucleus (around a few linchpins such as David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez and, to a degree, Curt Schilling) that provided some continuity when the team was ready for its next title run three years later. 

And the departure of Martinez represented a willingness to set aside nostalgia in favor of a more forward-looking approach. After all, the right-hander's exit permitted the Sox to acquire two picks in the 2005 draft -- one of whom became right-hander Clay Buchholz, who took the mound on Tuesday. 

Buchholz was hardly dominant on Tuesday -- on a night that Buchholz dismissed as "just one of those games" -- en route to a five-run (four earned) yield in six innings. Still, since a disastrous start to the year, he's been the Sox' best pitcher over the last five months, working to a 3.40 ERA in that time. 

Buchholz, who turned 28 in August, is a pitcher in the middle of a still-very-promising prime. He has a pitch mix that ranks with nearly anyone in the American League. The decision to let Martinez go and to concentrate on the long-term allowed the Sox to avoid a commitment to Martinez at a point in his career where his health would not permit him to remain an elite pitcher while giving the Sox a building block for their future. 

Contrast that with the approach that the Sox took after the 2007 World Series. Their most notable free agent moves were the re-signing of both Mike Lowell (who was healthy for roughly half a season before his production went into a tailspin) and Curt Schilling (who never threw another pitch for the team). Meanwhile, after the Sox retained Josh Beckett through his prime years, the team made the decision in 2010 to extend the right-hander for four seasons that likely represented his post-prime years, when declines in health and effectiveness seemed likely. 

That commitment to the 2007 core ended up proving costly. The Sox lost the opportunity to get picks for Lowell and Schilling. Meanwhile, the costly extension for Beckett contributed to the team's lack of financial flexibility in building a pitching staff over the last couple of years. The Sox had considerable motivation to deal him when the Dodgers proved willing to assume the remainder of his contract as part of the blockbuster deal last month. 

The memories of the 2004 Red Sox, meanwhile, did not suffer at all from the fact that the team was disbanded before it had a chance to repeat. To the contrary, in some ways, the images of that remarkably assembly of players remain all the more vivid and fresh because it did not have time to corrode. 

And so, a night that brought together personalities like Martinez and Millar and Foulke and Trot Nixon, among others, celebrated the start of a remarkable run of several years, rather than an apex that was visited once but never again. 

As difficult as it is to amalgamate a championship roster, the hard decision to take it apart ultimately can play a critical role in the long-term health of an organization. The juxtaposition of the retired Martinez and the in-his-prime Buchholz underscored the idea that nostalgia is best devoted to reunions rather than roster construction.