"It was mid-afternoon on a Saturday that couldn't decide between sunny or dreary, in a town whose summer baseball promises the same ambiguity, when the bleacher denizens of Dodger Stadium attempted to initiate the wave.

Five innings and most of a sixth had come and gone, and so had most of their hitters, as had any chance of sending the hated San Francisco Giants to a three-straight-loss, opening-weekend gloom.

So, they turned to one final bit of self-amusement, that burned-out vestige of three decades (at least) past, because it was either that or picking out a vulnerable Giants fan to chase into the parking lot. And that already had been done.

Following two Los Angeles Dodgers victories here, and with the locals yearning for something – anything – to rouse their sense of superiority, along came Matt Cain.

And with the game practically over when the Giants had four runs by the fifth inning, everybody in blue spent the rest of the day looking for something interesting to do.

In a rotation that houses The Freak and The Bust and The Rookie and The Guy Who Threw the No-hitter, what's left is Cain, the thick-legged right-hander born in Alabama, raised in Tennessee, and developed in China Basin. He always had been good enough and talented enough, but he chased his reputed potential and run support issues (and a way to beat the Dodgers) for so long that it began to appear he always would be just good and no better, a fine way to make a living but still perhaps unfulfilling.

Then along came the 2010 Giants, and an October that bled into November, and in three starts Cain outpitched Tommy Hanson, Cole Hamels and C.J. Wilson. By the time they were rolling around on the infield in Arlington, Texas, Cain had gone 21 1/3 postseason innings without allowing an earned run.

Scouts said Cain had found himself, that his pitching and reasoning had come together finally, that at 26 years old he could rely on four pitches – fastball, slider, curveball and changeup – and knew how to use them.

"Four plus pitches," said one, using the scouts' vernacular, "which you never see."

Well, not unless you happened to be at Dodger Stadium five months later."