“We’re not sitting here going, if he doesn’t have a Strasburg-esque first start, the world’s going to end,” Giolito’s father Rick said Tuesday evening, before the first of two rain delays drained some drama from the proceedings.

What Giolito did, though — for this team, in this season — was more than enough. He was as advertised on the mound; smooth, quick-working and composed, hovering around an easy 95 mph with his fastball. He controlled the Mets lineup, not allowing a runner past second base. He kept the pressure off worried pitch-counters, before buckets of rain in the bottom of the fourth ended any questions about how long was his leash. (“Definitely a bummer,” Bryce Harper said of the delay that ended Giolito’s night.)

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Still, 45 pitches and four scoreless one-hit innings against the defending division champs? It might not be a grand epic we tell our kids about, but it made for some enticing visions.

Because for the Nats, this night — unlike Stephen’s Strasburg’s 2010 debut — wasn’t about finding a savior, a reason to hope, or a reason to care. At some point soon, Giolito will be a regular here, and the Nats will have added strength to a strength, as the Caps did when they flung Evgeny Kuznetsov into their lineup. Like Kuznetsov, Giolito is a brilliant prospect with a longstanding pedigree, joining an established team that boasts bigger stars. Strasburg delivered a classic capital-e Washington Event, with Bob Costas and Ken Burns in attendance, throngs of national media, spiking ticket prices, and the biggest television audience in team history to that point. And Giolito’s debut, which ended in a 5-0 win?

“It does [have hype], but for better reasons,” Ryan Zimmerman said. “And that’s a good thing.”

The hype, Zimmerman meant, was for a team unveiling another valuable piece, one that might pitch meaningful innings sooner rather than later. While the Mets wonder about their pitching — yup, that was Matt Harvey flirting with trouble again on Tuesday — the Nats could imagine the sort of imposing rotation New York took to the World Series last year. That group included Noah Syndegaard, a fire-spewing 6-foot-6 right-hander who made his debut the previous May.

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You don’t think the Nats could find a slot for baseball’s top pitching prospect in the fall? That’s why principal owner Mark Lerner said the electricity, for him, felt familiar.

“I’m just as excited tonight as I was for Stephen’s,” Lerner said. “That one was really a turning point in the franchise; this could be too. This young man, he could be a superstar one day. He’s got the stuff. He’s got all of it.”

The Nationals Strasburg joined in June of 2010 were unremarkable and forgettable, rice cakes dipped in water. A loss to Dusty Baker’s Reds the night before Strasburg’s debut put the Nats six-and-a-half games out of first, and in their familiar last-place perch. The fan base was waiting for a jolt. The wait had lasted, oh, 700 or so days.

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“Back then, we were searching for a lot of meaningful things,” said Zimmerman, the only National to play in both games. “We’ve kind of come a long way, which I think is good for Lucas, because there’s really not much pressure for him to do something like that. It’s more about winning games now than it is about having someone strike out 14 so people come and watch us play.”

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“Stras came at a time when we were all looking for a positive story,” GM Mike Rizzo added. “We were not a good team. We were a franchise kind of trying to get our sea legs.”

The context that trailed the 6-foot-6 Giolito around Nationals Park on Tuesday was different. He was joining a first-place team, one focused not on a one-off media blitz but on winning a series. Hours before the game, Giolito quietly chatted with Joe Ross, who had faced the Mets the previous night. Baker’s advice came from Hank Aaron (“Be nervous but don’t be scared”) and Ted Williams (“Above all, be natural.)”

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Giolito’s pending appearance had less than 36 hours to marinate, amid predictions of dire weather, and so this was a modest crowd of 29,918 at rainy Nationals Park. (“I thought it would be 72 degrees, sunny, all that stuff, that’s how I dreamt it,” Giolito said.) One fan who had imagined making a quick profit on her ticket wound up offering it to me for free an hour before the game. Another who couldn’t unload his tickets to Giolito’s debut remembered selling his same seats at Strasburg’s debut for 10 times their face value. The first random fan I asked to name the night’s starter paused — “I heard it’s some rookie,” he said — and the second fan I asked offered a valiant try. (“Isn’t it like the ice cream, Gelati?” he guessed.)

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But for the savvier supporters, who gave Giolito three or four ovations before he threw his first pitch, this had been building for years. Taking a first-round gamble on a kid with an ligament tear in his elbow and a pending surgery demanded patience. The positive minor-league outings, the praise from scouts and the No. 1 prospect rating were promising, but after waiting more than four years, those four innings between rain storms felt like the beginning of a payoff.

“It gives us a real sense of pride,” Lerner said. “How many people take a chance like this with No. 1 draft choices?”

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Giolito said he didn’t notice the crowd, that there might as well have been zero people in the crowd. Rizzo said he wanted to think of this start as something mundane, like the first start for Tanner Roark or for Ross. And Lerner tried to remain similarly blase.

“I just want him to feel good about himself,” he said of Giolito before the game. “I’m sure they’ll pull him at the right time, so he can walk away with a smile on his face.”