Martina Hingis is a champion again. Five months into her second life on the tour, Hingis yesterday won her first title of the season, defeating Dinara Safina in the final of the Internazionali d’Italia, 6-2, 7-5. As of today she will move inside the Top 15.

Hingis had not won a title since February 2002, before she took a three-year vacation from tennis because of two ankle surgeries. When she left the game at age 22, no one had won a Grand Slam title at a younger age in the 20th century (16 years, three months),and no one had reached the no. 1 ranking sooner. Now 25, Hingis said she feels like she is beginning anew.

“I almost feel like I won my first title,” she said. “This is what you play for, what I came back for.”

Hingis’s victory on clay in Rome ought to improve her confidence for next week’s French Open, the only major she has not won. Considering the ragged play and injuries that continue to trouble the tour, she might easily find herself alive heading into the tournament’s final weekend.

In 2006, Hingis has been among the tour’s most consistent, and most healthy, players. She has played more matches than anyone and her record on the year stands at 31-10, trailing only Nadia Petrova in victories (33-7). Before yesterday, she reached one final and three semifinals. Four of the women ranked in the top 10 as of yesterday had not played 30 matches.

On the court, Hingis continues to prove that steady play and guile can succeed in a field populated by bashers with little grasp of tactics. Safina, the younger sister of the immensely talented Marat Safin, is a case in point. The 6-foot Russian has five inches and 25 pounds on Hingis, yet she spent most of the after noon trying to win medium-paced rallies against a woman whose groundstroke skills are on par with Chris Evert’s.

The strategy was a resounding failure. Hingis hit more winners than Safina (32 to 18), and made one fewer error (23 to 24).She hugged the baseline and angled Safina out of position, opening lanes for winners and approach shots. At the net, she was her usual superb self, volleying crisply and even winning a point with a volley lob as Safina slid toward the net after recovering a drop shot.

Hingis breezed through the opening set, winning the first five games, and the second set was not nearly as close as the score suggests. Hingis took a 4-1 lead and held two match points on Safina’s serve at 5-3. Safina, who turned 20 last month, deserves praise for playing aggressive under pressure and leveling the score at 5-5.Yet she squandered her best opportunity of the afternoon – a weak second serve from Hingis at 6-5, 0-40 – and could not bring the set into a tiebreaker. If Safina’s athletic gifts were supplemented by Hingis’s temperament and understanding of strategy, she would have won more than four career titles by now.

There are several Safinas on the women’s tour at the moment – Nicole Vaidisova, Anna-Lena Groenefeld, and (sometimes) Svetlana Kuznetsova, to name a few – and Hingis should continue to feast upon them. Her second serve remains a liability, but Safina and many others are content on most occasions to put those softballs back in play (Safina hit a few outright winners and should have tried for more of them).Though she will lose her serve three or four times a match, Hingis’s precision and tactical prowess more than compensate.

A different trend, however, has emerged against the game’s elite. Hingis is 4-8 this year against the women who were ranked inside the top 10 as of yesterday, and 27-2 against everyone else. Women who can move as well as Hingis, such as Kim Clijsters, Justine Henin-Hardenne, Venus Williams and Petrova, and hit with power often overwhelm her. One could witness this in the first set of her semifinal match against Williams, which Hingis lost at love before taking the next two sets 6-3, 6-3.When Williams plays well, there’s no time for Hingis to do anything (it did not help matters that she played poorly in the first set). She doesn’t have the firepower to keep a top opponent on the defensive.

A concern back in January, when Hingis began her comeback, was that she would become frustrated by late tournament losses, especially at the hands of players who are worse at tennis but far better in terms of athleticism. Hingis has admitted that she has struggled with this to some extent, such as when she lost to Kuznetsova at the Nasdaq-100 Open earlier this year. “She’s very fit and strong,” she said of Kuznetsova at the time. “I have to win with the tennis and not with anything else.”

Hingis will continue to have to win with her tennis, and she will need a lot of luck (namely, poor play from a few top opponents) to capture more titles. Still, winning in Rome is an excellent start. And with so many other women either struggling or hurting, she should be in the hunt in Paris.

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Last week, there was Rafael Nadal versus Roger Federer in a five-hour thriller. This week, Tommy Robredo versus Radek Stepanek. After Nadal and Federer withdrew from the Hamburg Masters in Germany to rest up for the French Open, the final clay court tune-up of the season became a free-for-all. Robredo took advantage, winning the first Masters Series of his career by the score of 6-1, 6-3, 6-3. In other news, Guillermo Coria, the finalist at the French Open in 2004, said he would miss this year’s French Open and Wimbledon because of an injury to his elbow. Coria had lost in the first round in three consecutive tournaments.

tperrotta@nysun.com