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were far from being a bunch of doddering old geezers during their 2½ hours on stage.

Daltrey still strutted like a Greek god and twirled his microphone recklessly. Townshend, despite his vow never to do his arm-flailing windmill strum again, was windmilling freely. And remember, this was on their first night.

Tuesday night will be different, not only in the way the band plays, but also in what it plays. It’s not likely to be a song-for-song replica of the Toronto show.

In subsequent dates, the Who reportedly have held true to their promise to shuffle their song list for every performance. They’ve freely drawn from the six hours of material they rehearsed.

The Buffalo date, then, shapes up as an artistic success and a commercial disaster. Why isn’t it selling out? For good reasons:

• The two Toronto concerts in June. These siphoned off as many as 10,000 fans from both sides of the border, especially because arrangements for the Buffalo show remained in doubt for more than a month after tickets went on sale for the Toronto shows.

• Tuesday night. The Toronto dates fell on the weekend. The show here is midweek, which always makes for poorer attendance. Who can blame working people — the ones who can best afford $25 a ticket plus service charge — for having second thoughts about how late they’ll be getting home? It further inhibits fans who face a drive back home to Rochester, Syracuse, the Southern Tier or Erie, Pa.

• The Grateful Dead and the Rolling Stones. In the end, the Who was simply upstaged coming and going — first by the world’s biggest cult band doing a July Fourth holiday gig, then by their lifelong rivals, the group that has overshadowed them ever since they started out in ’60s.