Mike Celizic

Last year, the Yankees and Red Sox opened the season against one another, and, though it was exciting in Yankee Stadium, it was too early for so much emotion.

This time, the schedule makers got it just right. On the first day of May, with all players — resident aliens and native-born citizens alike — ready to work, the two biggest rivals in the game took the field in Fenway Park in a virtual tie for first place.

What followed was a game made for the October-like weather, a game that had everything that makes this baseball’s best rivalry. The Red Sox won it in the best possible way, cemented by a three-run home run by Big Papi, David Ortiz, the prodigious blow fittingly struck against sidewinding, left-handed reliever Mike Myers. Even better, Myers is the pitcher the Yankees signed over the winter specifically to get out Ortiz.

Ortiz’ eighth-inning hit may have effectively ended the game, but it also symbolically opened the 2006 baseball season. I know the games have been going on for nearly a month, but just as the golf season doesn’t really begin until the Masters, the baseball season doesn’t really begin until the Yankees and Red Sox get together.

There’s no need to hype the rivalry. The history stretches back through the decades, and a string of playoff meetings in recent years has cemented its standing as much more than just a regional rivalry like so many others in the game. Yankees-Sox is now a national event, like Colts-Patriots in football, Tiger-Phil in golf, Kobe-LeBron in the NBA.

There had been a somewhat manufactured storyline about the return of Johnny Damon to the city where he had become the beloved leader of the team that finally brought a world championship back to Boston. It held up for as long as it took the Boston fans to greet his introduction with an ocean of boos and a trickle of cheers and he to return it with a doffed-helmet salute.

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Even afterwards, the media kept asking Yankees whether they were surprised and/or offended that Damon was thus hailed and abused by fans of the team he served so well for four years. Derek Jeter fairly snorted at the question, asking the reporters how else they’d expect a Yankee to be greeted in Boston.

Jeter was right, as were the fans. Nothing could be worse for the rivalry than for fans of either team to cheer a former hero who’s changed uniforms.

Wade Boggs was booed when he moved south on I-95, as was Roger Clemens. To treat Damon differently would have been to ignore everything that made the series such great theater. The players can respect each other if they so choose, but the fans are under no such obligation.

Anyway, once the game began, Damon was barely a subplot. The two teams had begun the night in a virtual tie for first place, with the Yankees holding an edge in winning percentage by virtue of having played fewer games. This early in the season, first place was already at stake.

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It was the first of 19 regular-season games between the two rivals this year. It could also be imagined as a delicious taste of what might come in October, where so much of the recent history of the rivalry has been forged.

If so, what a terrific postseason it will be.

It wasn’t the Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling on the mound, but Chien-Ming Wang and knuckleball artist Tim Wakefield. Wang struggled early, giving up a run in the first. Wakefield, who gave up only four hits, surrendered three runs in the fourth, an inning full of the sort of slop and walks that knuckleballers are heir to.

In the fifth, the Red Sox tied it off Wang, and that’s how it stayed until the bottom of the eighth, when the Yankees bullpen failed to show the depth and grit that management thought it had assembled over the winter. Aaron Small and Tanyon Sturtze set the stage for Myers, who came in with two on and one out and worked Ortiz to a 3-2 count before serving up a thigh-high meatball dead over the center of the plate.

The night was cold and the wind was blowing in with enough determination to have kept a half dozen other fiercely-struck balls in the park, but nothing could hold Ortiz’s in. It landed in the bullpen in right, ignited an eruption of joy in the stands and made the first statement in the first real game of the rest of the season.

It took a month of baseball to get to that moment. It was worth the wait.