One game is just one game, and it’s a bad idea to make too much of last night’s season-opener in the Bronx, which the Yankees won 9-2 in a cakewalk. Almost certainly, both the Yankees and the Red Sox will win somewhere between 90 and 100 games this year, and there’s an excellent chance that the two teams will meet with the pennant on the line for the third consecutive year this October.

The main significance of last night’s game had less to do with the Yankees and Sox than with Major League Baseball having finally figured out that if the old tradition of the first game of the year being played in Cincinnati is to be abandoned, it should be abandoned for something better than a Padres-Rockies game in Mexico.

Promoting the game’s best rivalry is exactly the sort of use to which the new tradition of Opening Night should be put. New Yorkers inclined to grumble that the 8:11 p.m. starting time precluded small children from watching the game to its conclusion should remember that the eastern time zone encompasses only the far quarter of what is a very large country full of baseball fans.

As a ballgame, the significance had less to do with the outcome on the field than with who was on it – neither of the two best teams in baseball saw fit to give the Opening Day assignment to a holdover pitcher – and the roles the teams played. The Yankees aren’t underdogs, because no team with a $200 million payroll and a lineup packed with former and current All-Stars can be. But for the first time in the history of the rivalry, they weren’t favorites, either.

The Red Sox came into the game as equals, and oddly, for all the ancient and recent history between these two teams, their newfound status as World Champions stripped away all the balderdash about a mystical curse, stripped events of some of their subtext, and left the game just that. A ball game.

You could make something out of the various miscues on the part of Red Sox starter David Wells and his fielders in the third inning, when the Yankees went ahead with a three-run rally. People probably will claim that the Sox were doomed to such ugly, ignoble failures as balking a run home in their first game as champions, and that this had to happen to remind them of their place in the natural order of things.

But that wouldn’t make a great deal of sense. It is, as they say, a long season, and there will be plenty of time for the Yankees’ many flaws in the rotation and on defense to show themselves, just as there will be plenty of time for the Red Sox to deal out humiliations to other teams, the Yankees probably among them.

Better than seeing a single game as some evidence of a cosmic order is to see it for what it is, and last night’s game was plenty. It was good to see Jason Giambi get a hit in his first at-bat after an off-season in which he became the scapegoat for an entire drug culture that owners, the press, and fans did little to discourage. It was good to see Hideki Matsui rob Kevin Millar of a home run with a leaping catch at the left-field wall, then follow up with a single, on which he eventually scored, when he led off the bottom of the inning.

It was good to see Derek Jeter dropping singles between the infield and outfield and driving balls into the gaps, and good to see Randy Johnson striking out batters. It was good to see Tino Martinez make a great defensive play in his first inning back in pinstripes. It was good to see Wells throwing strikes and David Ortiz hitting for power – especially good just to see baseball, passionately played, after a long winter full of talk about steroid injections and congressional powers.

Despite the crisp play of the Yankees and the sloppy play of the Red Sox last night, it wasn’t hard to see why so many have the Sox pegged as the better team this year – and believe it or not, it was right out there on the mound. David Wells is certainly no Randy Johnson – he’s obese, old as dirt, throws about 86 miles per hour on a good day, and last night he plunked Giambi twice and gave up nine hits in the first three innings. But he’s also thrown 195 or more innings in eight of the last 10 years of a career that’s seen him earn a deserved reputation as one of the great clutch pitchers of his generation, and he represents everything that’s good about this Sox team.

You might say that last night Wells failed to come through in the clutch, but he really didn’t – last night, for all the hype, was just one of 162 games, one of 19 the Sox and Yankees will play against each other. Wells’s presence on the Red Sox is the perfect symbol of this rivalry not because his “colorful” personality fits in so well with Boston’s image, but because the Red Sox looked at him and rather than see what the Yankees have seen the last two times they let him go – what he can’t do, and what he isn’t – they saw what he can do, and what he is. That took some guts and imagination, a lot more than trading for Randy Johnson did.

Running David Wells out for the opener is a move just like playing Mark Bellhorn, who can’t field and strikes out 180 times a year, at second base, or trading two-time batting champion Nomar Garciaparra for backup first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz and no-hit shortstop Orlando Cabrera – a move that might well look a lot better in October than it did at the time it was made.