I want to be clear that yesterday’s column — the one about how I wasn’t going to get swept up in Cubs optimism this year, the one that several of you apparently read and found “relatable” and “warm” and “touching” — was filed at approximately 11:15 in the morning, before first pitch, before Matthew Boyd gave up a two-run homer in the third inning, and before the Washington Nationals — the Washington Nationals, a team that lost 107 games last year — went on to beat the Chicago Cubs 10-4 on Opening Day at Wrigley Field in front of forty thousand people who deserved better.

I am not going to say I told myself so. I did tell myself so. The telling is right there, in print, under my byline, from yesterday. I am simply noting the timeline for the record.

The final line of yesterday’s column was “Go Cubs.” I would like to formally revise that to “Oh, come on.”

Alex Bregman, the centerpiece of the offseason, the serious player on the serious contract that I argued was the sign of a serious organization with serious intentions, went two for four with a double and zero RBIs. This is not Bregman’s fault. Bregman did his part. The problem is that the other parts did not do their part, and by the sixth inning the parts were down eight runs and the Wrigley crowd had achieved that specific acoustic quality that longtime fans will recognize: the sound of forty thousand people being extremely polite about their feelings.

My brother-in-law Phil texted me at the fifth inning: “Told you.” I did not respond. I will not be responding. Phil does not need the encouragement.

I want to say something generous here about Craig Counsell, the new manager, but what I will say instead is that Counsell has managed one game with the Cubs and it went 10-4 in the wrong direction, and whatever adjustments need to be made should probably start to be made soon, because the season is now one game old and it is already going like this. Counsell is an experienced professional and I’m sure he’ll figure it out. He has 161 games to figure it out. I’m told some of those games will go better.

Young Moises Ballesteros started as the designated hitter. He went one for three. He is twenty-two years old. I am not going to be unkind about a twenty-two-year-old on his first Opening Day. What I will say is that being twenty-two years old and starting at DH on Opening Day against major league pitching is a very specific kind of pressure, and I hope he’s eating well and sleeping enough and calling his mother, because this is a lot.

The Nationals, to their credit, played very good baseball. Their pitchers located their pitches. Their hitters hit the ball. They did the things a baseball team is supposed to do. The Cubs, for their part, also played baseball, just not the right kind and not enough of it. These are the facts of the situation. I have reported them.

Here is where I’m supposed to say something about the long season, the 162-game sample size, the fundamental meaninglessness of any individual game in the context of the full year. April games, as everyone who has ever tried to feel better about a Cubs loss knows, are worth exactly as much as September games in the standings, which is to say they count exactly the same and you are not allowed to emotionally discount them. I know this. I know Opening Day losses have been survived before. I know the 2016 team lost three of their first four games. I know all of this.

I still went to bed at nine forty-five with the television off and my phone face-down on the nightstand, which is what I do when I am managing my feelings, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. My nephew Marcus texted at ten p.m. asking if I wanted to talk about it. I did not want to talk about it. I left the text unread until this morning, which is when I opened it, typed “It’s fine, it’s one game, I’m fine,” and then wrote this column. We’ll see how Tuesday goes.

Go Cubs. I mean it. I’m not done. I’m never done. That’s the whole problem.