Ever since the cataclysm of last August, when the baseball strike aborted one of the Expos’ most promising shots at a World Series, ball club and fan have developed a bruised and wary distance. Opening night in Montreal was like a couple’s last brave try at reconciliation.

The reality that escaped few of the 46,515 patrons who thronged to see the New York Mets dispatched was that 1995 could be Montreal’s last season in the majors. No franchise in baseball is more imperiled, or more ripe for the plucking, in the moneyed aggression to attract teams to places such as Northern Virginia. And whatever its mixed feelings about baseball, Montreal would feel the sting of losing, for want of enthusiasm and good luck, Canada’s first major league baseball franchise.

The rush of opening night at Olympic Stadium may have dispelled momentarily the bad vibes of recent months. It was hard not to take heart from the outpouring of affection for Felipe Alou, last year’s National League manager of the year, and his son Moises, probably the Expos’ most prized and popular player. What sounded like boos in the Big O were really Alooooooos of pride.

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Despite the bitter aftertaste of the strike, despite the coulda-beens and we-wuz-robbeds, Montrealers forgave, forgot and behaved impeccably toward their Expos. Canadian sportswriters took satisfied note of the contrasting scene on the team’s first road game in Pittsburgh, where a grandstand banner called the Pirates crybabies.

The clock has been a few minutes short of midnight for the Expos many times during their 27 years in the NL. But the buzz of the moment assumes an imminent fateful tick. It’s not a ^fait accompli that the team is leaving, said broadcaster Rick Moffat, but more than ever before in Expos history, they are on the ropes.

Moffat, whose Mix 96 radio station gathered 20,000 signatures on a petition to declare the Expos last year’s season champions on the strength of their 74-40 record, said it will be a miracle if the team jells and matches what it did last year.

That’s not the only miracle the Expos are seeking. At the top of the list of strikes against their future in Montreal are the new pressures being brought to bear on so-called small-market teams, a category that includes Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and Montreal.

Canada’s smaller hockey cities are feeling a simultaneous pinch as they go up against the mushrooming resources and swelling popularity of hockey franchises south of the border. The Winnipeg Jets said Wednesday they were calling it quits in Manitoba, and the Quebec Nordiques could beat the Expos across the border.

Montreal Exponents don’t like the small-market label. Its 3 million people make this cosmopolitan city no less a market than Boston. There’s no such thing as a small market, observed Terry Haig, a sports journalist at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., there are just small-market philosophies, and we’ve got one here.

The reference is to the tight-fisted ownership of Claude Brochu and his partners, who bought the team from Charles Bronfman in 1991 for $80 million. In an effort to cut his salary outlays for the 1995 season (and his losses for the abbreviated 1994 season), Brochu recently traded away three of the club’s top performers center fielder Marquis Grissom, starting pitcher Ken Hill and closer John Wetteland. Meanwhile, their Canadian star, Larry Walker, went to Colorado as a free agent.

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With them, many believe, Brochu kissed away whatever slender hope the Expos had of picking up where they were so rudely interruptedby Brochu and the other owners, in one popular view last summer.

This has left fans to ask, as one did:If he’s not willing to invest in the team, why should anyone invest in a ticket? One of the heartbreaks of the 1994 season was that it ended just as the Expos were lifting off and beginning to fill Olympic Stadium’s ocean of empty seats.

The situation has all the appearances of a vicious cycle. Last Monday Brochu acknowledged the team’s difficult financial prospects, but said he hoped to surpass 2 million at the gate this year, even if season-ticket sales are down to 9,000. I know there’s work to do to convince people to come back to baseball, he told the Canadian Press. It may never be like it was before. We shouldn’t kid ourselves. But I don’t see why anyone should assume it will go badly.

Whether Brochu is ready to sell the team is an open question. The right offer apparently hasn’t come yet from a group led by Northern Virginia businessman William Collins, whose interest in luring the Expos generated the memorable Montreal Gazette headline, Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claude. Brochu told Collins the Expos are not for sale.

Even so, can this baseball marriage be saved?

Major League Baseball crossed the border into Canada for the first time in 1969, and the new team took for its name the symbol of Montreal’s economic and cultural flowering of the late 1960s, Expo 67. For the next nine years, it built a national following and won a division title in 1981. But the American League Toronto Blue Jays arrived in 1977, playing in Canada’s largest and major English-speaking market, and the erosion of the Expos began, hurried by the embrace of the Jays by English-language television.

Time has not answered the question of whether baseball can work here. Toronto, which has filled SkyDome in years past, proved that a nation where hockey is king has room in its heart for another sport, at least after the NHL playoffs. The Montreal Canadiens’ elimination from Stanley Cup contention days before the Expos’ opening night removed that favored excuse for weak club support.

But there are others. Summer in Montreal is even shorter than in Toronto, and Montrealers would just as soon spend their precious hours out of doors than under the latest makeshift roof of the Big Oespecially if the spectacle doesn’t promise glory. Montreal comes alive in the summer months, with back-to-back festivals that compete with the traditional summer game for entertainment hours and dollars.

How big a blow would Montreal feel if it parted ways with the Expos?

Probably it wouldn’t be a big dealand that’s the tragedy of it, said Michel C. Auger, a lifelong baseball fan and political columnist at Le Journal de Montreal. People here don’t realize what a calling card the team is for Montreal. The message they’re sending is that they’re a backwater. They can’t even do what Cleveland can do. They can’t even do what Pittsburgh can do.

LA TIMES-WASHINGTON POST05-08-95 1632EDT