There are true aces all over the baseball map this season, from South Florida’s Sandy Alcantara, who was brilliant again for the Marlins, to Gerrit Cole to Justin Verlander to Tony Gonsolin, who wasn’t supposed to be the Dodgers’ top starter but is 10-0 this season. There are more elite pitchers than that to talk about, for sure, and then Shohei Ohtani, who is beyond category -- just because he is so much more than just a pitcher.

But what we were reminded in Cincinnati on Tuesday night as Max Scherzer made his first start for the Mets in more than two months is that when the 37-year-old is on his game -- and, man oh man, was he ever against the Reds -- there is no better pitching show on earth, from any of those other guys.

There he was, pacing the Mets' dugout from the time he comes off the mound until the times he bounced up the steps like a kid to get back out there, talking to his teammates and apparently talking to himself sometimes, then getting back after the Reds, working the corners and blowing guys away with a fastball that topped out at 97 and looking as if he wanted to strike out the world.

He walked away with a no-decision in a game the Mets finally lost, 1-0, in the bottom of the ninth. But still, he made this feel like the Opening Day start he didn’t get to make in Washington back in April. He struck out 11, including five in a row at one point. Before he was done after the sixth and after 79 pitches, he had struck out every single batter in the Reds' order.

The Mets missed him mightily, even if they went 25-16 without him, waiting for his left oblique injury to heal at the same time they’re waiting for deGrom to finally heal. But what we saw against the Reds was something else: How much baseball missed watching a truly great pitcher dealing the way he did at Great American Ball Park.

“All he’ll want to know after he gets out there in Cincinnati,” Scherzer’s manager, Buck Showalter, said over the weekend, “is when he gets the ball again.”

Then Buck said something that echoed some of the comments he made after the Mets-Reds game:

“The rest of us only think we know how much he’s missed this. Not just pitching and competing. But being part of something. It’s what I saw from him as soon as he showed up at Spring Training: How much team matters to him.”

“To be on top,” Scherzer himself said after the game, “you have to be consistent.”

Scherzer knows all about that, for such a long time, from the time when he and Verlander were on the same pitching staff in Detroit. He knows all about it after three Cy Young Awards and finally winning a World Series with the Nationals in 2019, when he was the one who got the ball from Davey Martinez for Game 7 against the Astros and somehow held Houston to two runs over the five innings he pitched on a night when he wasn’t even close to having his best stuff.

It was 2-0 when he left the game that night, Oct. 30, 2019. But it was only 2-0 because Scherzer fought the way he did to keep it there. The Astros had one baserunner in the first that night, then two runners on in the second, third, fourth and fifth. Scherzer has always been more than just an arm, even if he showed you all the arm he still has on Tuesday night after his longest rehab start had been 4 2/3 innings.

“He wanted to go back out there for the seventh, eighth, ninth and 10th, if necessary,” Showalter said.

There is still no telling when deGrom, if there are no further setbacks for him, will make his first start for the Mets. We all wait to see if the manager will set up his rotation so that it is Scherzer in one game and deGrom the next. Or deGrom and then Scherzer. But if both of them are healthy on, say, Aug. 1, the Mets are going to be something to see down the stretch in the National League East.

Scherzer won his first game in the big leagues for the D-backs in 2009. He won his first Cy Young, for the Tigers, four years after that and then left Detroit as a free agent and won two more Cy Youngs with the Nationals. Now he is 5-1 with the Mets after nine starts, with a 2.26 ERA and 70 strikeouts in 55 2/3 innings.

Eleven more strikeouts Tuesday night. A no-decision that felt like so much more than that to his team. Mad Max was back. Mad fun in Cincinnati.