TO spare a few blushes, I'll resist the urge to name the guilty names, but there was an impressively ill-informed thrust to the conversation in the sumptuously appointed Scotstoun press room ahead of Glasgow's Guinness PRO12 match with Leinster on Saturday afternoon.

While the assembled media tucked into the fine wines and fresh canapes that were being distributed by liveried members of the Warriors' communications department, it was widely agreed among those present that a Glasgow win, on top of Edinburgh's against Munster the previous evening, would be a truly historic event.

"Never happened before," declared one long-serving hack as he popped a pickled quails egg into his mouth. "Scottish teams have never done the double on the opening weekend of the season."

"Absolutely not," another weighed in, swirling the '78 Petrus in his glass as he spoke. "Unprecedented. It really would be a first."

All of which sounded some rather loud alarm bells for yours truly. Now I'll happily admit that I'm as capable of talking and writing complete cobblers as any other passing hack, but my sceptic's antennae tend to start twitching, throbbing in fact, when I hear certainty expressed on this scale. "Hang on," I thought, "I know the Scottish sides have traditionally started slowly, but so have a few other teams in the league. Two wins on the same weekend surely can't be that unlikely."

Time was when it would take hours of research to check these things out. These days, though, the time is measured in nanoseconds. After a few moments of fast-fingered jiggery-pokery on the PRO12 website, I was able to confirm that there was, indeed, a precedent, and a relatively recent one at that, as Edinburgh and Glasgow had both kicked off the 2009/10 season with victories. For the record, the capital outfit beat Cardiff Blues 22-21, while Glasgow beat Munster 22-9. So much for history in the making.

Of course, in a fast-moving world some might say that the passage of five years puts September 2009 into something akin to a different geological time frame, when mammoths roamed the earth and the Orkney Islands occupied a tectonic plate somewhere off the coast of Madagascar.

After all, back then the world was in the midst of a financial crisis, and we had Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling running round in a blind panic, issuing promises they couldn't keep. We couldn't possibly imagine that sort of thing happening now.

That aside, there's still no question that last weekend's wins were uplifting for Scottish rugby.

Well, up to a point at least, as both were desperately close-run things. In fact the combined margin of victory for the two Scottish sides was just three points, as Edinburgh squeezed home 14-13 and Glasgow flopped over the line with a 22-20 win after Stuart Hogg's penalty deep into injury time. Throw in the fact that both Leinster and Munster were without a host of top Test names and the need for caution becomes clearer still.

Both have tricky weekend games ahead. Under normal circumstances, Edinburgh's BT Murrayfield meeting with Connacht on Friday would be a shoo-in home win, but nothing can be taken for granted after the Galway side trounced Newport-Gwent Dragons 16-11 on Saturday.

Nor is Glasgow's trip to Cardiff Blues on Sunday the sort of away-day any side would relish. The Blues can blow maddeningly hot and cold at times, but astute summer recruitment, coupled with the fact they scored more than 40 points on their away trip to Zebre last weekend, does rather suggest they might be warming up nicely.

Leave such details to one side for the moment, though. For by far the most intriguing, and most exciting, prospect in the wake of the new campaign's opening weekend was the thought that Edinburgh and Glasgow might finally build up some sort of credible rivalry over the next few months. While both have their moments in recent years - Edinburgh in Europe, Glasgow in the PRO12 - there has been an impression that the two teams have been on divergent paths.

Of course, we have all enjoyed those festive 1872 Cup clashes between the two teams. They have been feisty, edgy and wonderfully competitive. But, for the most part, they have also been completely meaningless as far as the bigger PRO12 picture was concerned. Frankly, it didn't particularly matter which team won or lost.

Thankfully, and belatedly, that situation has changed. Among all the other themes, this season's inter-city derbies, at Scotstoun on December 27 and BT Murrayfield on January 2, will have the subtext of European Rugby Champions Cup qualification to add a welcome element intrigue to proceedings.

Until now, both sides have walked into Europe unchallenged. Not any more.

That dimension adds something tangible to the contests. But the sense that the two Scottish sides are now rivals as much as colleagues ought to add something more. The success of the Irish teams over the past 15 years - Ulster, Munster and Leinster have racked up a total of six Heineken Cup victories - owes much to the timely emergence of a generation of supremely gifted players, but more, I suspect, to the internal competition that grew up between the sides. Has European rugby ever known a better occasion than the 2009 semi-final between Leinster and Munster, when 82,000 passionate supporters packed into Dublin's Croke Park?

No chance of that with the Scottish sides this season, as Edinburgh are in the lower-tier European Challenge Cup. But it would be wonderful to imagine that Alan Solomons' side really could start to exert some pressure on Glasgow over the weeks and months ahead, for their sake and for the Warriors' sake as well.

What price two teams in the PRO12 play-offs at the season's end? Now that really would be a first.