Chris Sale was Chris Sale again for the Red Sox on Tuesday night, against the Twins at Fenway Park. It means that he was as dominant as any starter in the whole sport, and maybe more dominant on this night, as he struck out 11 in six innings of a crazy game the Red Sox won in 10 innings, 5-4.

His first seven outs came by strikeout. The Twins had 19 swing-and-misses out of 44. Sale was every bit as dazzling as he once was with the White Sox, and then the Sox of Boston.

“It’s who I expect to be,” Sale said when it was over. “It’s who I need to be.”

And who he very much used to be.

“His stuff is better than it was in April of 2018,” Sale’s manager, Alex Cora, told me on Wednesday morning about what he’d seen from Sale the night before.

People absolutely forget who Sale was before just about everything started to happen to him once he’d ended the 2018 World Series against the Dodgers. He struck out the side in the bottom of the 9th and bottom of the Series, finally making Manny Machado look helpless.

Sale’s left elbow was already beginning to slow him down by late summer of that season. But even with that, he was 12-4 in 27 starts, with a 2.11 ERA and 237 strikeouts. He was still one of the true aces of the sport, the way he had been in his first season with the Red Sox, when he was 17-8 with a 2.90 ERA and an amazing 308 strikeouts in 214 1/3 innings.

And then, over time, he became the face of all the things that have gone wrong for the Red Sox since the ’18 World Series, even with the 2021 Red Sox getting to within two wins away from going back to the Fall Classic. The litany of things that have gone wrong with his own body, most baseball related but not all, reads like some sort of pitcher's Book of Job.

It all began, truly, after he signed a new five-year contract for $145 million with the Sox before the 2019 season, and became as polarizing a deal with Red Sox Nation since Carl Crawford once got a similar deal eight years earlier, seven years for $142 million. And made Sale a polarizing figure himself.

It is because of all this:

A 6-11 record in ’19, the year after the Series, with a 4.40 ERA until left shoulder inflammation first sent him to the 10-day injured list and then the 60-day, his season long since over by then. He was on his way to the Tommy John surgery that would finally make him miss all of the short season of 2020 and then not see him back on the mound until August 2021.

He pitched decently enough when he did come back, with a 3.16 ERA over nine starts. But then he had nothing in the postseason, giving up four walks and 10 hits and eight runs in nine innings pitched.

He came back again last season, making his second start, in July, against the Yankees at Yankee Stadium. In the first inning that day, Aaron Hicks hit a line drive right at Sale that fractured his left pinkie, requiring surgery. One month later, because at that point with Sale you simply couldn’t make this up, he fell off a bike and fractured his right wrist. The Book of Sale.

Sale was 34 when this season began, and he proceeded to get mostly smacked around in his first three starts, by the Orioles and Rays and Tigers. The first one was against the Orioles, Sale’s first start at Fenway in 18 months. Baltimore got him for seven hits and seven runs in three innings and afterward Sale said it was “the most embarrassed I’ve ever felt on a baseball field.”

But then came Tuesday night at Fenway, when Sale pitched better than he has in years, pitched the way he used to pitch when he had all of his arm and all of his stuff and came at hitters with that slingshot style and made an awful lot of them look as awful as Manny Machado did to end that ’18 Series, which must now seem like a hundred years ago to the lefthander from Lakeland, Fla. who has always been as skinny as an exclamation point.

Here is something else Cora told me about Sale:

“He is healthy. We just need to be patient. Competition and repetitions are very hard at this level.”

What was even harder for the Twins at Fenway was trying to hit what Sale was throwing. He has been joking that while he is 34 his arm is only 31 because of all the time he has missed. It looked that way Tuesday night. After all the lost years, you couldn’t tell what year it was with him. They got him in a big trade with the White Sox five years ago, because they needed an ace, and because they wanted him to be a game-changer for them.

This was just one April start on Tuesday, of course. But all this time later, Chris Sale pitched like a game-changer for the Red Sox, again and at last.