So much of the conversation between the Red Sox involves the intertwined fates of Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz, and similarly, the entanglement of their performances and the fate of the 2013 Sox. "If Lester and Buchholz bounce back … and if they don't ..." has become the standard issue disclaimer as predictions about the team filter in.

Yet while the notion of the Sox' dependency on those two pitchers is not unreasonable (perhaps slightly exaggerated, but not unreasonable), the premise is flawed.

Lester is trying to find his way back this spring. Buchholz is not, having already accomplished that feat in the middle of last season.

It is, of course, somewhat difficult to characterize a year in which a pitcher went 11-8 with a 4.56 ERA a success. Yet Buchholz -- who did not give up a run in 1 1/3 innings while walking and striking out two Twins on Saturday, in his first start of the spring -- views it in those terms, and with solid basis.

"I felt really good," Buchholz said of his offseason view of his year. "Looking back and going into the offseason, I felt pretty good about everything -- how I was able to bounce back and get on a straight line instead of going so much up and down."

It was, in many respects, a season of three segments for Buchholz -- a terrible beginning, an extraordinary stretch in the middle and a modest fizzle at the end. But given where he started, it was not difficult to understand why the 28-year-old was satisfied with where he ended up.

As he struggled to regain both his confidence on the mound and his feel (he lost the ability to work his change up down in the strike zone, turning a devastating out-pitch into a vulnerability) at the start of 2012, he slid into one of the worst pitching slumps in Red Sox history. He opened the year by allowing five or more earned runs in six straight starts, the longest such streak by a Red Sox pitcher in 87 years, and through nine starts, he had a jarring 7.84 ERA.

But from that point on, in part thanks to the addition of a split-finger fastball that got him back to working at the bottom of the strike zone, he was a well above-average pitcher over the final four-plus months of the year. He had a 3.41 ERA while holding opponents to a .236 average, .294 OBP and .382 slugging mark.

"[The split] could have made his changeup better because with the split, you have to really get out there and stay up on top. With the changeup, it's the same thing. It also causes the fastball to get back on track," said catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia. "When he keeps the ball down, he's unhittable. It was good for him to gain that confidence back, having the year he had the year before and then having the back issues. Last year, starting off the way he did, it was nice to see him progress into what he was doing.

"He is an elite pitcher, an All-Star pitcher," he continued. "That's something he can build on -- he can build on last year."

Once he regained his ability to bury his change, his two-seam fastball and his splitter at the bottom of the strike zone, Buchholz went off. Over a stretch of almost three months, from May 27 through August 19, Buchholz had 12 straight starts in which he worked six or more innings, averaging a whopping 7.53 innings per start during that run while forging a 2.19 ERA. His ERA during that run was third best in the majors, behind only eventual Cy Young winner David Price and Felix Hernandez.

That stretch was a reminder of Buchholz's ceiling, of the idea that, when on, he can be as good as any pitcher in the majors, the same pitcher who went 17-7 with a 2.33 ERA (second best in the AL to Hernandez) in 2010. And that, in turn, is what differentiates Buchholz's season from Lester's. Whereas Lester lost his mechanics last year and did not, on a sustained basis, show the same stuff that defined him as one of the best pitchers in the American League from 2008-11, Buchholz recovered from his brutal start and showed that he still possesses the ability to dominate.

By the end of the year, Buchholz believed that he'd restored himself to being the same pitcher he was in that All-Star campaign.

"I felt the same [as in 2010]," Buchholz said. "That's what I told everyone after 2010 -- how do you replicate that and do the same thing? Nobody knows. There was big situations throughout the whole year in 2010 where I needed a ground ball double play and I'd get it. Last year, at the beginning of the season, I needed a ground ball double play and somebody would hit a home run. That was the difference. I wasn't near as confident at the time. It took a couple games to get myself headed in the right direction and forget about everything except for trying to keep the team in the game."

Over the last six-plus weeks of the season, Buchholz endured something of a backslide, with a 5.62 ERA down the stretch. It wasn't the final taste that he wanted for the year.

Even so, the fact that he made a career-high 29 starts while likewise logging a personal best in innings (189 1/3) -- despite landing on the disabled list for three weeks due to internal bleeding in his stomach -- offered him the basis to hope that, without the same uncertainties that plagued him at the start of 2012, he's positioned himself to be the pitcher whom the Red Sox need at or near the top of their rotation in 2013.

New Sox pitching coach Juan Nieves has seen the attributes that would be desired from such a pitcher.

"He has an incredible ability to change speeds, great feel for all his pitches and the ability to fix a pitch within a pitch -- miss up, miss down too low on a change up and he can adjust to it, which the good ones usually do. He has great sink, and the ball comes out of the hand with no restrictions whatsoever. He has a good rhythm and tempo," said Nieves. "He finished the season really strong from May on. That's what we're going to build on. I think he's in a really good spot."

That, of course, represents a considerable contrast to where he was a year ago, and underscores why Buchholz has emerged from last season feeling that it represented a potential springboard rather than an albatross.