By Ernie Palladino
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It would have been a better story if Matt Harvey had come out in Game 1 of 2016 and blown away the team that caused him so much heartache in Game 5 of last year's World Series.

Had his support looked more like the Mets of the final two months of the season, Harvey might have had that happy, redemptive beginning against the Royals on Sunday night.

Instead, he'll just have to settle for a nice, solid outing and a 4-3 loss.

Considering the health scare Harvey experienced last week and the uncertainty over how the medication to treat the bladder clot would affect his performance, solid was more than sufficient.

One can expect Harvey to regain the arrogant dominance that comprises as much of his game as the fastball/slider/changeup/curveball repertoire he made such good use of in the opener, assuming of course he stays clear of any further calamities. And had the lineup helped even a little against radar buster Edinson Volquez, Terry Collins might have seen that swagger.

Instead, Harvey left the mound for Bartolo Colon with two out in the sixth deserving better than what his teammates offered. He wound up being charged with four runs, three earned, and struck out only two.

It didn't even qualify for that statistically ambiguous quality start.

No matter. He was so much better than the numbers.

Not a single one of the Royals' eight hits off him was hard hit.

Eric Hosmer, the power-hitting first baseman, had three of those -- two bouncers and a sixth-inning bunt, of all things, that put Lorenzo Cain in scoring position for the first of two runs that frame.

Harvey also got the Royals to hit into three double plays.

A Hosmer bouncer, a soft Kendrys Morales sacrifice fly, and Alex Gordon's sinking liner that Juan Lagares had to field on a short hop in center drove in the three runs that came in on Harvey's direct watch.

Consider, too, that things might well have gone far differently had the defense not gotten him into trouble from the get-go. Yoenis Cespedes, whose flub in center on the first pitch of the World Series sent Alcides Escobar flying clear around the bases, blew it in left this time when he casually reached for Mike Moustakis' soft one-out, first-inning liner and dropped it. Travis d'Arnaud's passed ball moved him to second, and Hosmer's bouncer through the second base side of short scored him.

Harvey retired seven straight after that, with only Omar Infante's second-inning fly to right reaching the outfield.

Cain led off the fourth with a soft lined single, wound up on third on Hosmer's bouncer through the right side, and scored on Morales' lazy fly to center.

Bloops, bouncers, and bunts did in Harvey that evening from a pitching standpoint. But what really hurt him was a Mets lineup that performed more like the one that opened last season than the thumping, run-scoring machine that gave Harvey and the rest of them a World Series shot in the first place.

With Volquez clocking consistently in the high 90s, the lineup mustered just two hits in his six innings -- Asdrubal Cabrera's second-inning bounce single and a broken-bat single from Cespedes in the third.

It wasn't until Michael Conforto lined a Kelvin Herrera fastball off the wall for a seventh-inning double that the Mets placed a runner in scoring position.

They got back in the game with three eighth-inning runs. They threatened in the ninth.

Ultimately, they couldn't get the starter off the hook.

Harvey will have to wait for ultimate dominance.

A no-decision would have been nice. A win, and the measure of redemption for Game 5 that came with it, would have felt even better.

For Start 1 in Game 1 of 2016, though, solid was plenty good enough.

Follow Ernie on Twitter at @ErniePalladino