BOSTON — Is the sky falling?

Last night it certainly felt that way.

The night the Sox looked very vulnerable, getting shellacked in a game most of the baseball world thought they would win, Jon Lester with the ball in Fenway Park. About as much a sure thing as you can find in playoff baseball, right?

So much for sure things.

Sunday night it had been Josh Beckett who had self-destructed at Tropicana Field in Tampa.

Last night it was Lester, who had turned Fenway Park into his own little field of dreams this season. The same Jon Lester who had been so dominant in this postseason, the same Jon Lester who has been called one of the best young pitchers in baseball. The same Jon Lester who gave up two home runs in the third inning, two shots that gave the Rays a 5-0 lead, five runs that stood up all night on the scoreboard like an oasis in the desert the Red Sox could never reach.

Is the sky falling?

It’s too early for that.

But after last night the warning signs are there for the Red Sox.

First and foremost is the failure of both Beckett and Lester, two the aces of this pitching staff, almost as if they are an entry, 1 and 1A. They arguably are the best one-two pitching punch in the game. But Beckett imploded Sunday night in Game Two, and Lester left last night with two outs in the sixth inning down 5-0.

Did anyone see this coming?

Not many, that’s for sure, as this postseason had been a showcase for Lester’s emergence as one of the true elite players in the game. Last night, though, nothing was clicking, and as Rays’ manager Joe Maddon said before the game, starting pitching is where it starts in baseball.

And in the last two games the Red Sox have not gotten good starts.

But it’s not just Beckett and Lester.

Jacoby Ellsbury can’t seem to get on base, and David Ortiz looks like a mere facsimile of the Big Papi we’ve come to know. The Big Papi of legend was the ultimate clutch hitter, someone whose big bat seemed to ignite Fenway Park as if it were a magic wand. Now the magic is gone.

Is it the wrist, which had Ortiz on the disabled list for a while during the season?

Is it thinking about the wrist?

Or is it just a bad patch?

Whatever it is, Ortiz now looks like just another guy struggling at the plate, even if the Rays are on record as saying they still fear him.

Not that Ortiz was the only Sox player who seemed to bring a Popsicle stick to the plate last night. Matt Garza looked like Cy Young through five innings, and the Rays looked like they were the ‘27 Yankees, not a team that was supposed to struggle against Lester.

“I wanted them to have to beat my fastball,” Garza said.

And when former Hendricken star Rocco Baldelli drilled a three-run home run over the wall in left in the top of the eighth inning for an 8-1 lead, as if he were playing Toll Gate instead of the Red Sox, this one was over.

So what does this mean?

Is it just one game that got away from the Sox early, and then had to spend much of the game trying to chase, in a game where Garza was in command?

Or is it a preview of what’s to come in this series, baseball foreshadowing?

That’s the question. But there’s no question that the Rays have been empowered by these last two games.

Yes, they had won the American League East title. Yes, they had won 97 games. Yes, they had held off the Red Sox all season long, even when it seemed several times that the Sox were going to overtake them and send this double-knit version of Cinderella back home to that silly domed stadium in Tampa.

But it wasn’t like anyone was really afraid of the Rays, right?

Wasn’t it just a matter of time before the Red Sox essentially said, yeah, you’ve been a nice little story all summer, but these are the playoffs and we’ve been there and you haven’t?

Hadn’t Ortiz said he had thought the Rays were tight before the first game, as though the stage was a little too big, certainly not something they were used to?

Until the last two games proved to the Rays that they not only belong here in this ALCS, they can win it.

It’s the same way that their two wins in September here in Fenway, the place that always had been a little house of horrors, proved to them that they could win here, too. Rest assured there’s no one on the Rays that doesn’t think they can’t win this series.

Last night told them they could.

If nothing else, it assures them of going to back to the Trop, where they don’t lose very often. If nothing else it makes them believe they can beat the Red Sox, no small thing for a young, aggressive team that’s come out of nowhere this season, and believes that destiny is all suited up and sitting in their dugout.

So last night’s 9-1 debacle has ramifications for the Sox that go beyond the fact they are now down, 2-1, in this series, tattooed in a game just about everyone in the baseball world thought they were going to win, at home in Fenway, Lester with the ball.

The sky is falling?

It’s too early for that.

But now the Sox are behind in this series and tonight they will give the ball to Tim Wakefield and his knuckleball, the most unpredictable pitch in the game.

Somehow that seems only fitting.

An unpredictable pitch for an unpredictable team in a series that now seems unpredictable.

breynold@projo.com