We don't know what's going to happen, but we do know what has.

After the Red Sox' 8-1 win over the Royals Sunday afternoon at Fenway Park, the Sox find themselves one game back of the pace they set last season after 52 games, currently standing at 29-23.

Compared to the same lump of games a year ago, they have scored more runs (251-231) and allowed more (251-237) while achieving one of their goals by supplying more of an offensive threat on the road. (After the same number of games as 2009, they have 122 runs and 35 home runs in 23 contests away from Fenway Park, compared to 127 runs and 32 HR last season.)

Considering the roller coaster ride to date, all of it offers a fair amount of encouragement.

But there is one dynamic that trumps all when looking at what might be for the Red Sox. That is the 1-2 punch that has emerged over the past few weeks in the form of Clay Buchholz and Jon Lester. Staying on the theme of last season, this is becoming Josh Beckett and Lester all over again.

"It's fun when things are going good," Buchholz said.

It began on May 19, when Buchholz beat Minnesota's Scott Baker. That 3-2 win put the Red Sox over .500, a position they have not deviated from since. The next night Lester topped Francisco Liriano, 6-2, completing the two-game sweep.

The next go-round for the duo came in Tampa, with Buchholz first beating Wade Davis, 6-1, and then Lester following up with a 2-0 victory over James Shields.

Then, this past weekend, after two straight losses to Kansas City, Buchholz smacked the Royals in the face with a 1-0 win, which was piggybacked by Lester's outing Sunday.

It is the same sort of thing that carried the Red Sox through this stretch of games a year ago, when Beckett and Lester offered perhaps the game's best 1-2 punch, leaving little to no chance of the Sox falling into the abyss of a losing streak. 

In Beckett's final 13 starts before the All-Star break he went 9-1 with a 2.14 ERA (starting May 5), while in Lester's last eight starts prior to the game in St. Louis he totaled a record of 5-1 with a 1.48 ERA. Combined, when the two pitched during their respective stretches, the Red Sox went 18-3.

It is a much smaller sample size, but the back-to-back power of Buchholz and Lester has had a similarly powerful effect.

Since the May 19 jumping off point, the two have combined for a 1.04 ERA (5 earned runs in 43 innings), going 6-0 in the six starts.

In the short term, this has become the Red Sox' fail-safe. While the rest of their starters' outings during the 12-game run of games has resulted in a 3-3 mark, knowing Buchholz and Lester are on the horizon while everything else gets straightened out offers some peace of mind. It is the same kind of easy feeling allowed by Beckett and his left-handed throwing compadre 365 days ago.

Long-term, the possibilities are spine-tingling for Red Sox fans.

Both Buchholz and Lester were born the same year as the Transformers franchise (that's 1984 for those unfamiliar with Decepticons). But, more importantly in terms of the pitchers' long-term presence in Red Sox uniforms, their opportunities to enter the fantastic voyage that is free agency are relative light years away.

The Red Sox have control over Lester through the 2015 season, paying perhaps the game's best left-handed pitcher $3.5 million this year, $5.5 million in '11, $8 million in '12, $10 million in '13, and $10 million in '14, with a club option of $11 million in '15.

Buchholz will have one more season after this one before he can dip his toes into the arbitration world, entering this year with just more than one year of service time. For those counting, that means the Red Sox have control over the righty for the next four years after '10.

"That's what you play for. You play you for your first three years to get to the point where I can make money in this game or go a different way," Buchholz said. "Eventually that's what everybody wants to happen, but you can't really think about it during the season because it can really affect the mental aspect. I'm going to go out and try to do my job as well as I can and go from there.

"This is where I want to play. This is the only place that I've called home in professional baseball and it's where I want to stay. That would be something my agent and I would discuss and bring it to Boston if that was the case."

We haven't mentioned the promise of a healthy Beckett, or what seems to the be the certainty of John Lackey's career path. All of it, if lumped together, offers the Red Sox the opportunity to possess the four legitimate top-of-the-rotation arms through the '14 season.

It's impossible to know exactly what's going to happen, but the last two weeks have offered a glimpse as to what could be in store for the Sox. And that, if nothing else, should offer the kind of optimism many thought wasn't possible not too long ago.

"This is looking like it's going to be something special for years to come," Buchholz said.