He became a punch line at the end, a victim of today’s what-have-you-done-for-me-lately? culture. Keith Foulke’s pitching ranged from mediocre to miserable throughout 2005 and ’06 — as did his personality — and no tears were shed in these parts when he opted out of the final year of his Red Sox contract last autumn. His surprise retirement Friday, on the day he was supposed to report to his new team, the Indians, was greeted with a collective local yawn.

It’s hard to fathom. Because the Red Sox wouldn’t have won the World Series, or anything else, in 2004 without Keith Foulke.

You can make the case that no Red Sox reliever – not Dick Radatz, not Bill Campbell, not Bob Stanley or Jeff Reardon or Lee Smith or Derek Lowe, not anybody – ever had a season like Keith Foulke’s in 2004. The number of saves (32) wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but his pitching was.

The number that best illustrates it was his earned-run average of 2.17, compiled as it was in a league with an average ERA of 4.87. The statheads have a way of measuring a pitcher’s effectiveness called ERA-plus. A pitcher with the same ERA as the league average scores at 100. Foulke scored at 225, better than any Red Sox reliever in history. The only Sox pitcher to do better in recent years was Pedro Martinez.

But it went far beyond numbers. He was no hothouse orchid, packed in mothballs until the ninth inning of a game in which the Sox led. Terry Francona wouldn’t hesitate to bring him on in the eighth — and, in the postseason, the seventh — if the game was on the line. He pitched in tie games. He occasionally pitched when they were behind. He pitched when the Red Sox needed him.

Never did they need him more than in the ALCS, after they had fallen behind the Yankees, three games to none. He threw 50 pitches in Game Four in the Sox’ 12-inning win. He threw 22 more in Game Five in the 14-inning victory. Then they brought him in to close out Game Six at Yankee Stadium with a 4-2 lead.

In his brilliant book, Feeding The Monster, author Seth Mnookin related that an exhausted Foulke couldn’t break 88 or 89 mph on his fastball, which wasn’t fast enough to make his 82- to 83-mph changeup effective. He sandwiched two walks around two outs, bringing Tony Clark to the plate as the potential game- and series-winning run.

“That at bat, for me, was the most nerve-wracking moment of the series,” general manager Theo Epstein told Mnookin. “Foulke has nothing, he’s getting squeezed [by home plate umpire Joe West’s tight strike zone], and a Clark home run ends it all.”

The count went to 3-and-2. Yankee Stadium was in a delirious frenzy, the noise levels approaching the din that the fans created in Game Seven of the 2003 ALCS. Foulke gave up on his out pitch, the changeup, and went back to his fastball. The runners took off on Foulke’s windup. The pitch came in.

Clark swung and missed.

With all due respect to David Ortiz’s Games Four and Five heroics, it was the most dramatic moment of both the series and the postseason. It was the kind of test — a tight game in the Bronx, with the Yankees, who had trailed early, 4-0, barreling back from behind — the Red Sox were supposed to always fail.

The “curse” was officially broken the next night in a one-sided Boston rout, but the myth that the Yankees would always beat the Red Sox when everything was on the line ended when Keith Foulke struck out Tony Clark.

Curt Schilling passed into legend that night, and rightly so, with his seven bloody innings at the front end of the game. What Keith Foulke did at the back end was just as memorable.

And yet it seems to have been forgotten, buried under two years of subpar pitching and off-field distractions like his broken marriage and the “Johnny from Burger King” quote. (“I’m more embarrassed to walk into this locker room and look at the faces of my teammates than I am to walk out and see Johnny from Burger King booing me.”)

It’s not that Foulke should have gotten a lifetime pass for his ’04 heroics, or not been taken to task for his sometimes boorish behavior of the last two years. It’s that his personal and professional failures in ’05 and ’06 seem to have overshadowed everything else.

And they shouldn’t.

amartone@projo.com