So much happened the first weekend of the baseball season because it always does once the games start. The pitch timer, one of the great innovations in the history of the sport, happened. We got much faster games, shifts were gone, and we even got stolen bases back for what felt like the first time in a long time. There was big fun from coast to coast.

Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani hit back-to-back bombs for the Angels and Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton each hit a home run in the same inning at Yankee Stadium, where Stanton tried to hit a ball to Vermont.

But no place was more fun than Fenway Park, which the Red Sox and Orioles turned into a theme park over three games between Thursday afternoon and Sunday afternoon.

By the time the Orioles left Jersey Street, the Red Sox had taken two of three from them, scoring nine runs in each of those three games, which worked out to 27 runs in 26 innings, putting them in some elite company. The Orioles scored 23 runs of their own, including 10 on Opening Day, as they finally hung on to win, 10-9.

They came back and scored eight on Saturday and were one out away from taking the first two games of the series when Masataka Yoshida's routine fly ball to short left field, one that should have ended the game, surprisingly bounced out of Ryan McKenna’s glove.

Then Adam Duvall, who had about as rousing a hello as any new Red Sox player has ever had, hit one off Orioles closer Félix Bautista into the padding at the top of the Green Monster. It was Duvall’s second home run of the day and the first walk-off of the baseball season. In that moment, what could have been an 0-2 start to the season and last place in the American League East had become the happiest and craziest place in baseball.

“I feel like I see the ball pretty well and I like to pull the ball,” Duvall said after Sunday’s game. “So, it’s good to have [the wall] there.”

Well, yeah, kind of.

Duvall has now played seven games at Fenway in his career, including three with the Braves in 2020 when he hit four home runs (it was against a rag-arm Red Sox pitching staff, but still). The totals for those seven games are now 11 extra-base hits and 14 RBIs.

Against the Orioles, Duvall was 8-for-14 with three doubles, two homers, a triple, and eight RBIs. To use the old “Jerry Maguire” line, Duvall pretty much had the Fenway faithful at hello. He showed up for the start of his first Red Sox season and, for three games, hit like a right-handed David Ortiz.

I asked Alex Cora about Duvall’s debut on Sunday night and got this typically understated response from the Red Sox manager.

“Good player,” Cora said.

Earlier in the day, before his team won the weekend series (when they easily could have started 0-3 against the Orioles the same way they did in 2021 at Fenway when they lost their first three games at home for the first time since 1948), Cora had also said this about Duvall:

“To see that wall 81 times, hopefully plus, I think there’s a comfort level for him.”

There was a comfort level, too, for Cora, watching the balance in his batting order, whether it was against sketchy Baltimore pitching or not. Clearly, it was organized around Duvall even more than Cora’s star, Rafael Devers, who quietly began his season with seven hits in 15 at-bats, for a cool .467 batting average. And shortstop Kiké Hernández, one of Boston’s October stars in 2021 when the Red Sox came within two wins of another World Series, hit home runs on Saturday and Sunday.

It doesn’t mean he’s going to make Sox fans forget Xander Bogaerts, because that’s not going to happen anytime soon, but for a couple of days, he made them miss him a little less.

Of course, it wasn’t all moonbeams and unicorns for the Red Sox. Corey Kluber, their Opening Day starter, seemed to be throwing strikes as a last resort, as the Red Sox were on their way to falling into a 10-4 hole before scoring five in the last two innings to give themselves a shot in the bottom of the ninth.

Then Chris Sale, making his first Fenway start since September 2021, got rocked on Saturday afternoon for seven runs and three homers in three innings. He later said it was “as embarrassed as I’ve ever been on a baseball field.”

But the Red Sox came back again, this time from down 7-1. McKenna gave them life when it was still 8-7 Orioles and then Duvall rocked Bautista and rocked the old place with what felt like a bigger moment than the Red Sox had all of last season. One more big swing from him in a dream debut.

It was just one series against the Orioles. You can imagine what the gloom-and-doom coverage would have been like if McKenna had caught the ball and the Sox had gone to 0-2 to start the season. But McKenna didn’t and the Red Sox didn’t.

You still can’t run out the clock in baseball, even with a pitch timer.