As ugly as it was, there’s something bigger at work

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Look on the bright side: You’ve spent the better part of eight months talking yourself into the talking points of this 2017 Yankees. You’ve marveled at all the young hitting. You’ve written sonnets about the back end of the bullpen. You’ve accepted the fact that the starting pitching, on the whole, isn’t very good.

Mostly, you’ve rearranged your brain to see things in a certain way, to gaze fondly at the future rather than obsess about the present. You hear Brian Cashman and Hal Steinbrenner and the others invoke patience, and even if that’s never been your baseball DNA default position as a Yankees fan you’ve bought in.

You — dare we say it? — trust the process.

So here was an early test for you, to gauge just how trusting you really are. Here was a 7-3 Opening Day loss to the Rays in front of 31,042 at Tropicana Field in which just about everything went wrong, from the moment Joe Girardi lost his first challenge of the year in the top of the first on a Matt Holliday groundout.

Here were Gary Sanchez, Greg Bird and Holliday, your 2-3-4 hitters, going 0-for-13 and stranding eight base runners. Here were Brett Gardner and Jacoby Ellsbury, looking awfully similar to the last time we saw them, seven soft outs and one walk between them.

Worst of all, here was Masahiro Tanaka, who’d been brilliant all spring, who was the one bedrock of belief you thought you could latch onto amid these stormy seas, who gave up three firstinning runs and seven earned overall in 2 ²/₃ innings, whose ERA sits at a tidy 23.63 after the Rays battered him bloody.

“Maybe,” Tanaka would say after, “I was a bit hyped up.”

Said Joe Girardi: “I wasn’t expecting that.”

But here’s the thing: If you’ve truly bought into the broader pieces of the jigsaw puzzle the Yankees are trying to craft together, then this is a sixth straight Opening Day loss that doesn’t carry nearly as much worry as the five that preceded it, or by any of the 75 or 77 losses this year that will come after it.

It’s a brave new world, isn’t it? Assum- ing you buy in, of course. Assuming you’re willing to focus on the smattering of good things that happened Sunday, from the bullpen’s 5 ¹ /₃ innings of scoreless work to Aaron Judge’s booming double in the second inning to the three times — thanks to a bunt and two wellplaced groundballs — that Chase Headley used the Rays’ aggressive shift against them. “I’m a better hitter when I use the whole field, and I want to be able to get a bunt down to get guys closer to where they’re supposed to be,” Headley said, and though it’s unlikely Headley is going to hit .750 this year it had to be a satisfying afternoon for fans who’d spent so many of the past three years screaming themselves hoarse begging Brian McCann and Mark Teixeira to once — just once! — take advantage of all that open acreage on the left side of an infield. Hey, small victories are supposed to matter this year, right? You still with us?

“The way we played in the spring, it’s obvious what we can do as a team,” Judge said. “We just have to keep that rolling into the season.”

There’s a terrific moment in the YES Network yoga commercial promoting the new season in which one of the instructor’s command is ,“… MANAGE expectations for GARY SANCHEZ …” which is a hopeful nod that even the Yankees’ high command — who don’t own the network anymore but would surely have given their go-ahead to let the ad run as is — acknowledges that this is a different kind of season.

It was actually about Sanchez that Girardi was speaking Sunday when he said, “He’s not going to be perfect, and we have to manage expectations but my opinion hasn’t changed.” But it could just as easily have been a message directed to the whole roster, 1 through 25, and to those who care the most about their journey across the next 161 games.

There’ll be plenty of better days ahead — and also plenty of days just like this one, where you keep waiting for five o’clock lightning that never strikes, where you find yourself wondering what’s on the History Channel. But it’s OK. You’ve bought in. You trust the process. You understand there are growing pains aplenty. And it’s good, all of it, all good. Honestly. It is.