People can’t seem to agree on anything these days, be it sports, politics or your all-time favorite movie. But here’s one that does work: Everybody’s festive and celebratory when the Boston Red Sox lift up the corrugated steel doors at Fenway Park for the traditional home openah.

I don’t know that kids actually skip school anymore to make it over to Fenway for Opening Day, but that kind of spirit is still there. While there’s no doubt the New England Patriots have long since passed the Red Sox in terms of popularity, Week 1 at Gillette Stadium has nowhere near the charm and pageantry of Opening Day at Fenway. And here we go again, with the Sox set to host the San Diego Padres on Friday afternoon. Bring a sweater, but only for the trip home. The game-time temp could hit 70.

But as any Red Sox fan will tell you, the home opener comes with some fine print: It’s OK if the Sox begin the season on the road and play poorly leading up to the home opener. But once the red, white and blue bunting has been put away, once the giant American flag that covers The Monster has been rolled up, once the special guests and cast of celebrities have left the building, it’s back to business for Sox fans. As in trips to the postseason, not trips down memory lane.

The Red Sox began this season on the road, with three games against Terry Francona’s Cincinnati Reds, followed by a three-game set against the Houston Astros at Daikin Park. But after toppling the Reds on Opening Day on the strength of six shutout innings from ace lefty Garrett Crochet and three hits from 21-year-old star in the making Roman Anthony, the Red Sox have lost five straight games. This means the Sox will be lugging a 1-5 record out to the chalk line during the pregame introductions Friday.

How bad have the Red Sox looked so far? CB Bucknor bad, that’s how bad. They’ve already allowed 11 home runs. They’ve committed six errors. They’re hitting .171 with runners in scoring position. They struck out a whopping 38 times in the three losses to the Astros. The series ended with a 6-4 getaway day loss in which Crochet gave up five runs (four earned), three of those runs coming across on a 402-foot home run by Carlos Correa. Houston’s unearned run was made possible by a badly flubbed grounder by shortstop Trevor Story.

Red Sox manager Alex Cora summed it up this way: “Not good … not good.”

Cora also made a last-second decision to pull catcher Carlos Narváez from the starting lineup. The manager spoke cryptically about why he made the move, but was up front about why Anthony wasn’t in the lineup. Cora called it a “reset,” which made sense considering Anthony was 1-for-17 with 10 strikeouts in the four games since Opening Day. 

The news wasn’t all bad. Remember how in spring training it was being said right fielder Wilyer Abreu might hit 30 home runs this season? Anyone want to make it 40? Abreu hit another home run Wednesday, his third. He’s hitting .417. As for Anthony, he was sent up as a pinch hitter in the ninth inning and jumped on Bryan Abreu’s breaking pitch on the outside corner and lofted it to left field for a home run. The Sox have similarly lofty expectations for Anthony — as in signing him to an eight-year, $130 million contract extension last summer — and this will be his first home opener. Better to have fans buzzing about the home run he hit Wednesday than the 1-for-17 that preceded it.

Everybody overreacts when baseball teams get off to bad starts. But it’s been eight years since the Red Sox won the World Series — a laughable lament in just about every other big-league market but a big deal in Boston now that “1918” has been retired as a Yankee Stadium catcall. It doesn’t help that Red Sox principal owner John Henry rarely appears in public anymore, though he did show up on screen for a few seconds from a suite in Cincinnati. People want to know if ownership is still interested in the big prize, and a sluggish start ratchets up such talk. 

Anthony is the wild card in all this. The Sox no longer have a David Ortiz or Mookie Betts — or even an Alex Bregman, whose leadership was so important to this youngish bunch last season. But anyone with even a casual interest in the Red Sox has talked up Anthony as the next face of the franchise. (Keeping in mind we’ll need to revisit this notion if Abreu keeps hitting home runs.) There’s even talk that Anthony could be, yikes, MVP. And that got me to thinking about Fred Lynn, who as a 23-year-old in 1975 was American League MVP and Rookie of the Year.

Lynn makes an excellent point: While he and Jim Rice arrived in the big leagues in late 1974 as top prospects, not a lot of fans were screaming for them to take over the team. That’s partly because fans didn’t do deep dives into baseball prospects in those quaint, pre-internet days, but also because the mid-1970s Red Sox had Carl Yastrzemski. Now Red Sox fans are looking for the next Yaz, or Lynn, or Rice, or Dwight Evans, or Ortiz, or Betts.  

“Roman Anthony, geez, when he came up last year, man, that’s a lot of pressure,” Lynn told me. “That’s a big difference between his career starting and my career. I snuck up on people.

“This kid, the trumpets were blaring as soon as he came,” Lynn said. “His whole family was there. I watched it. Totally different scenario from me and Jim. And to his credit, he did pretty well. It took him a few at-bats to figure it out … and when he got on the road and away from all that, that’s when he started to take off.” (Lynn pointed out that while he’s seen Anthony play, he hasn’t met him yet. He said he’s looking forward to that.)

Now, second-year big-leaguer Roman Anthony and the 2026 Red Sox are returning home. For the Sox, the 1-5 start doesn’t matter. Not on Friday. For Anthony, the 1-for-17 doesn’t matter because in his first plate appearance Friday, he’ll be looking for his second straight home run.

But then comes the day after the home opener, and it’ll be all about first place, not first pitches.

Read the fine print.