MANSFIELD, Mass. — The Police took a while to get going last night at the Comcast Center, but they eventually got there.

The trio of bassist-singer Sting, guitarist Andy Summers and drummer Stewart Copeland have been on the road for 14 months on a reunion tour that ends next week and included several area appearances, including at Fenway Park last summer. At first, it sounded like the miles might have gotten to them, especially compared with the Fenway show, as they began with nothing-special versions of “Message In a Bottle” and “Walking On the Moon.” They whanged into “Demolition Man” but lolled through a “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” in which the entrance into the chorus, a whip-crack on record, was last night a muted thud.

They geared up for good during the grafting of “Voices Inside My Head” to “When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around,” when Summers took an extended guitar solo in the latter piece with plenty of his trademark dissonances. At that, they seemed to wake up.

The following “Driven to Tears” began with the fast section that ends it on record, and lost nothing when it cut the clangor for the verses. And from there, the band took off, with a bouncy “Hole in My Life” (one of many of their songs that mix a reggae lilt in the verses with a new-wave drive in the choruses) that stuck the dismount.

Sting, as a solo artist of long standing, is a known entity, and his suave purr of a voice and bubbling bass playing were on display as usual, but Summers and Copeland again lifted the band above solo-Sting territory, with the nearly spastic Copeland acting as the engine room of the band, dishing out exploding reggae- and jazz-based fills with a manic look in his eye (and playing parts of “Wrapped Around Your Finger” and “King of Pain” on a giant percussion setup), and Summers belying his laconic manner with extended dissonant, often Eastern-based, solos.

The trio is just that, still with none of the additional musicians who were on the last tour of their first incarnation (although there were a few canned backing vocals and percussion last night). So a lot of the songs were stripped of the sheen of their recorded versions. While occasionally this resulted in half-hearted attempts to re-create the studio moments, such as on “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” it mostly gave Copeland and especially Summers the chance to shine, with, among others, “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da” and “Every Breath You Take” getting as close to a garage-band treatment as they’re likely to get. And it’s heartening to see that a band their age is doing this well with less, not more, augmentation.

They only played an hour before doing the fake good-night-we’re-leaving-oh-gee-I-guess-we’ll-do-an-encore, the first of which was a meandering “Roxanne,” but then included a reworked opening to “King of Pain,” with bass chords and Copeland on his percussion kit, and an extended “So Lonely” in which the volume ebbed and flowed but the energy never did. “Every Breath You Take” and “All I Want Is to Be Next to You” wrapped up the 95-minute show.

Elvis Costello and The Imposters opened the show with classics including “Alison” (with a guest vocal by Sting), “Pump It Up” (suitably snarling and guitar-heavy), “Clubland” and “Every Day I Write the Book” (both of which badly missed the polish of their recorded versions), along with four songs from his latest album, Momofuku, most notably the rambling “Turpentine” and the lovely ballad “Flutter and Wow.”

Probably due to current events, the closing “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding?” pounded with even more anthemic power than on the record, while Nieve leavened it with piano quotes from “Singin’ In the Rain,” “Theme from A Summer Place” and “In Other Words.”

rmassimo@projo.com