By Jeremy Harness

SAN FRANCISCO – The Giants, who had looked nothing like the defending World Series champs for the first couple of weeks of the season, have suddenly reverted back to championship form against their hated rivals.

A night after Tim Lincecum shut down the Dodgers in the series opener Tuesday, Joe Panik’s sac fly brought in pinch runner Gregor Blanco to give the Giants a dramatic 3-2 win before a crowd of 42,259 at AT&T Park, after the much-anticipated Madison Bumgarner-Clayton Kershaw throwdown was declared a draw.

Bumgarner had the advantage for much of the game, but he relinquished that after he gave up a two-run homer to Alex Guerrero to tie the game in the seventh inning. He was then taken out of the game, and, since Guerrero had pinch-hit for him, so was Kershaw.

The Giants’ bullpen, which had not been as sharp as it was in key moments last year, was brilliant on Wednesday, as George Kontos, Sergio Romo and Santiago Casilla combined to keep the Dodgers off the scoreboard the rest of the way.

The Giants loaded the bases with one out, and even after the Dodgers crowded the infield by inserting an extra player – right fielder Yasiel Puig, in this case – at third. It didn’t matter, as Panik flied to deep right, and Blanco scored easily to give the second baseman his first career walk-off RBI.

“It was a nice piece of hitting,” Giants manager Bruce Bochy said. “He didn’t play around. He hit the first pitch he saw, and it was a pitch he could handle. He’s gotten a lot better at-bats. He’s got great poise.”

As for the starters, Bumgarner surrendered a pair of runs on six hits while striking out six and walking two, while Kershaw also gave up two runs on only three hits while issuing only one walk against nine strikeouts.

“Both of them threw the ball very well,” Bochy said. “I look forward to a matchup like this. I thought it would be a tight ballgame, and we did some little things (to win), and that was the difference in the ballgame.”

For the first two innings, Bumgarner v. Kershaw was shaping up to be the pitching duel that it always seems to be expected, when the completely unexpected happened in the third inning.

Joaquin Arias, who entered Wednesday’s game batting .143, led off the inning with a single, which Brandon Crawford followed by drawing a walk after an epic battle with Kershaw, perhaps the most dominant regular-season starting pitcher in baseball.

Bumgarner himself moved things forward for the Giants’ offense. He seemed to back out completely in his attempt to lay down a bunt – as if he were just trying to just make the slightest contact and then get the heck out of the way – but he was successful in landing the ball down the third-base line and move the runners up.

Arias then scored on Nori Aoki’s grounder, and then Matt Duffy’s single brought in Crawford to give the Giants a 2-0 lead.

In the sixth inning, as a sign that things were going the Giants’ way, Aoki, who led off the inning with a single, was picked off of first by more than five feet. However, he was somehow able to evade the tag of first baseman Justin Turner and make it back to the bag safely.

But that was rendered moot when Aoki was caught stealing second two pitches later, and the Giants could not do any more damage against Kershaw.

That proved to be costly in the seventh, as after a leadoff single, Guerrero crushed a stray Bumgarner fastball and sent it midway into the left-field seats to tie the game up.

Guerrero, who entered Wednesday with a .400 average, is now 3-for-4 in his career at AT&T Park.