TAMPA – The gasps were audible, and they were immediate, and they bounced around the grandstand at Legends Field like acoustic Superballs. Randy Johnson understands, he does. He realizes people pay their money to come to these games, and just because the calendar reads March and not May, they expect to see the real thing.

Hell, in his own mind, Johnson expects the same.

“Once you step between the lines,” he said yesterday, “the competitive part of your personality takes over and you want to play the game to win. The juices start to flow. You want to let it go.”

So, yes, it bothered Randy Johnson when Curtis Granderson took his first pitch of the day and drilled it through the hole between second base and first. It certainly bothered him two batters later when Chris Shelton, the Tigers’ first baseman, treated an 0-and-2 slider the way Sonny Liston once treated Floyd Patterson’s face and sent it sailing off toward Dale Mabry Boulevard.

It didn’t bother him as much as it bothered the people sitting in the sun in the dark blue seats, but that’s the way it’s going to be for Johnson this year, and it’s best to get used to that quickly. The last, lingering image Yankees fans have of Johnson isn’t the stellar relief shift he turned in during the desperate hours of Game 5 in Anaheim last October, but rather the horrific drubbing he’d absorbed two nights earlier, in Game 3 at Yankee Stadium.

That was simply an ugly coda to what had been a less-than-legendary maiden voyage for Johnson, a man who arrived in the Bronx with his Hall of Fame ticket already punched and his plaque already ordered. That may be the reason why Johnson’s 2005 season in memory seems so much worse than it does on paper.

Quick: Do you know his numbers from last year?

No peeking.

OK: He was 17-8. His ERA was 3.79. He struck out 211 hitters. He walked only 47, the second-lowest total of his career for a non-abbreviated season. More nights than not, he was exactly what he was supposed to be, which means he was lights out and he was dominant and he gave the Yankees as good a chance to win as any pitcher in the American League could have.

But when you have been what Johnson has been for so long, “more often than not” doesn’t translate so well. And that 6.14 ERA against the Angels didn’t help matters, either.

So the gasps will be there, as they were yesterday, whenever Johnson dips his toe back into the waters of mortality. He gave up those two loud first-inning runs. He gave up three more in the third, spared responsibility for them when a more-than-generous official scorer charged centerfielder Kevin Thompson with an error on what should have been an inside-the-park home run. He wiggled out of a fourth-inning jam.

He threw 64 pitches and wasn’t bothered by any of the ones that didn’t behave as he’d like them to. He’s 42 years old. He knows the difference between March and May.

“There are things I have to accomplish each time I take the mound during the spring, and I can’t ever lose sight of those things,” Johnson said. “It’s vital to me to build my velocity slowly, because I’m a power pitcher, and I rely on my velocity. I guess I could string a lot of zeroes together and that would be wonderful, but it really wouldn’t help me get to where I need to get to.”

And Johnson needs to get there, because that will determine much of where the Yankees will travel this year. It’s clear the Yankees have plenty of arms; what’s less clear is how reliable any of them are. Mike Mussina is a year older, coming off an injury. Jaret Wright and Carl Pavano are still high-priced wild cards. Shawn Chacon has looked good, but there are still questions about that being a permanent condition.

“As long [Johnson] he feels good, that makes me feel good,” manager Joe Torre said. “And as long as he feels good, I think this team could be pretty good.”

If he does, and if he is, then they could be even better than that.