Seventy-one beautiful degrees.
That was the temperature on this night that included a beautiful sunset seemingly just down the street from Fenway Park, along with the presence of baseball's best player.
If nothing else, 9,284 fans had the Mike Trout Ticket on the kind of Friday night we have yearned for for far too long.
But the feel-good Red Sox weren't stopping there. This was going to be a night -- perhaps THE night -- we proclaimed baseball was back.
Instead of a sea of empty seats and piped-in crowd noise accompanying a roster that was built on promises and projections, there was definition this time around. And it came in the form of the Red Sox' 4-3 win over the Angels.
"It was a cool Friday night at Fenway, to have a curtain call, it was great to see," said Red Sox manager Alex Cora. "The vibe was outstanding. The fans were into it. It was a great night, it was a great night. Hopefully we can get many of those."
For many, it was a perfect night.
You had two of the game's most dynamic players -- Trout and Shohei Ohtani -- showing their stuff, but not to the point of actually handing the home team a loss. (Although opposite field Ohtani's homer off a Nick Pivetta curveball did make life uncomfortable for the Red Sox.)
There was the kind of pitching presence that typically fans only bank on with bigger names -- like Pedro Martinez, Chris Sale or Craig Kimbrel -- on the mound. That's how good the likes of Pivetta and closer Matt Barnes were. The Red Sox starter dominated for the majority of his six innings, ultimately allowing two runs. Barnes? He struck out the side to finish things off ... again.
"We felt coming into the season that the five guys we have in the rotation and the other guys in case we needed them, we were going to be fine," said Cora after Pivetta's ERA landed at 3.16 for the season. "They're going to compete, they're going to give you quality innings, they're going to keep the game in check. We felt that way coming into it. You see the names, some of them have upside and some of them have history in the league, Eduardo (Rodriguez), Nate (Eovaldi), Garrett (Richards), the upside, Nick, the upside. Martin, he's done it before. We only had one bad one, it was the third game of the season. I don't know what game this is, 40, 41 games, but you guys see it on a daily basis. We can count on five from them and it looks like now it's a little bit more from those guys. That's when things are going to start trending better, because you take care of the bullpen, you don't have to go through the same guys all the time. That's when you start putting wins pitching-wise. We know we're going to hit, we know we have a chance always offensively, but if they keep doing this and going deeper into the game, that's great news. We'll take it."
And to top things off, there was the ultimate image of better things ahead -- rookie Bobby Dalbec completing the Red Sox' MLB-best 16th come-from-behind win with a two-run, seventh inning homer.
And then came to the punctuation for the entire almost-Summer scene: A curtain call.
"It was crazy," said Dalbec of the home run celebration, which was urged on by Christian Vazquez. "Crazy moment, special moment, something that you dream of as a kid.”
There will be more games like this, with more fans, and bigger moments. But considering what we've had to deal with over the past year-plus, it's OK to soak in the night having the Mike Trout ticket truly paid off.
"That was a cool Friday night," Cora said. "That was something that obviously I haven't seen in a while and for the boys, it's very important. In the beginning it was like 4,000 people and they were loud. Now there's more and they were louder, so it was cool to see Fenway this way."
