If the season had started when it was supposed to in late March, before the pandemic changed everything for everybody, the Yankees had four key players who would not have been ready for Opening Day because of injuries: Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, James Paxton and Aaron Hicks.

But now they all might be. Paxton and Hicks matter a lot to the 2020 Yankees. Judge and Stanton matter more. They aren’t being asked to stay on the field for a long season this time. Just the short one we all hope will begin in a few weeks.

• Cashman 'optimistic' on return of injured Yanks

But even now, less than a month from when the Yankees are supposed to begin their season, general manager Brian Cashman is being as careful with his language about his injured players as he is with his expectations for the players themselves.

“I think on all of them, I’m optimistic they would be ready to go when the bell rings,” Cashman said in a conference call with the media on Tuesday. “I also don’t want to put them in a position where I’m stating with certainty in advance before they even have been reintroduced to our personnel to make promises I can’t keep either, so I’m trying to get myself a little wiggle room and defer to how difficult the sport can be and challenging it can be ... I think health-wise, we’re in a good position where these things are resolved or resolving to the point where it’s just really more of a conditioning than an injury matter.”

Short answer: Fingers crossed.

As always, the fascination is with Judge and Stanton, who we thought might combine for 100 home runs in a season when Cashman traded for Stanton in December 2017. He’d just hit 59 home runs for the Marlins, Judge had just set a new rookie home run record of 52 with the Yankees. We all know how balls fly out of the new Yankee Stadium, especially in right field, and even for right-handed power hitters. But only one of them -- Stanton, in 2018 -- has played a full season since. Judge missed 50 regular season games one year and 60 another. His home run total for the past two seasons is just two more than he hit in ’17, when he was even more the home-run face of baseball than Stanton, just because Judge was a Yankee.

Of course Judge and Stanton can still be the most dangerous 1-2 home run combination in the game, in a 60-game season when 20 homers might feel like a lot. Just not if the Yankees can’t keep them on the field.

New York City did have the biggest home run star in baseball last season, but it was Pete Alonso, breaking Judge’s rookie record by hitting 53 homers for the Mets. Judge would hit 27 for the Yankees after suffering a significant oblique injury at the end of Spring Training. A year later, he never got on the field because of what was finally diagnosed as a stress fracture to his first right rib. At the time, the Yankees didn’t think Judge’s season would start until the summer. Now everything doesn’t start until the second month of summer.

Maybe the delayed start helps the Yankees more than anybody else, because they really might have Judge and Stanton, Paxton and Hicks, ready to go. Stanton suffered a Grade 1 calf strain back in February. The Yankees didn’t expect him to be ready for the original Opening Day, even if they did expect him back sooner than Judge. Obviously the prognosis for Judge was worse.

• Five key Yankees storylines for 2020 season

You know the possibilities for the Yankees if they do stay on the field. The Yankees, as a team, hit 306 home runs last season. Stanton (who played just 18 games) and Judge contributed 30 to that total. Again: Coming off what we’d just seen from them in 2017, it really wasn’t crazy to think that they could combine for 100 homers. So far, in two seasons, because of the injuries, they’ve combined for 95.

We all saw last October that the Nationals wouldn’t have won without Stephen Strasburg and Max Scherzer being as formidable as they were, in one big game -- most of them elimination games -- after another. But we also saw something else: They would have had no chance to become one of the great stories of all time in baseball without Anthony Rendon and Juan Soto being the kind of 1-2 punch that they were in the middle of the Nationals’ batting order. You don’t have to go further than Game 5 in their National League Division Series against the Dodgers:

The Nationals were losing, 3-1, in the eighth inning. Clayton Kershaw had come out of the bullpen for the Dodgers. Then Rendon and Soto hit back-to-back home runs on back-to-back pitches. Game tied. Howie Kendrick would eventually hit a grand slam to win the game and the series for Washington. It doesn’t happen without the Nationals’ total star power -- in all ways -- in the middle of the order.

Of course we know Judge and Stanton are capable of a moment like that. Judge is still just 28. Stanton doesn’t turn 30 until November. We’ve still only had a small sampling for the big guys (Stanton is 6-foot-7, Judge is 6-foot-6) as teammates in New York.

But at Yankee Stadium this season, the magic number for them isn’t 60 because of home runs. Just games.