It was Walker Buehler who took me back in time.

As the fireball-throwing righty took the mound for the Los Angeles Dodgers last night to clinch the World Series, it took me back five years, the day I hopped on the Dodgers’ bandwagon.

I had been living in L.A. for a year. My high school buddy Adam who lived nearby splurged for National League Division Series tickets at Dodger Stadium. Braving two hours of crosstown traffic, we met in Elysian Park, streaming in the gates in a wave of blue. We scarfed down Dodger Dogs (he had a vegan dog) as Buehler — then a 24-year-old phenom — mowed down the Washington Nationals, allowing just one hit in six innings.

I was a lifelong Orioles fan. But Dodgers-Nationals was the first playoff game I had ever attended in person. Randy Newman’s song “I Love L.A.” swirled throughout the stadium as the sun settled to the west, striking a brilliant orange onto the Los Angeles skyline. The whole thing felt like a spectacle more than a sporting event, the perfect L.A. vibe.

I never stood a chance. I bought a Dodgers hat on the way out. Somehow, that shade of blue seems to go with everything.

At the time, the Orioles were irrelevant, in the midst of a painful rebuild. Wearing an O’s hat got me more pity than fellowship in my years out west. The Dodgers, I figured, would be my NL team — a little social club of me and a few million of my Southern California neighbors.

Membership was all pros and no cons. The players were charismatic and fun to cheer. During the pandemic, when it felt like we were all living behind panes of glass, Justin Turner, Corey Seager and Mookie Betts could pick up your day and make it interesting in a heartbeat.

As easy as it is to climb aboard the Dodgers bandwagon, it’s even easier to stay there. They’re always in the playoffs, a streak now 12 years running. When they lost Seager and Turner, they replaced them in the lineup with the likes of Freddie Freeman and Shohei Ohtani.

For L.A. die-hards, perhaps coming up short in the playoffs for so many of those seasons is frustrating. But for a casual fan it was easy come, easy go. You can always pencil in the Dodgers for next year’s postseason, and they’ll probably be in the mix to win it all.

For the Dodgers, any year can be a World Series year. And 2024 was, again, their year, with the bonus of the victory coming against the New York Yankees. As Buehler struck out Alex Verdugo for the final out of Game 5, I hooted at my TV, feeling a personal kind of closure after first watching him pitch half a decade ago. I texted Adam about watching the thrilling finish. Neither of us lives in L.A. anymore, but we both have held onto the Dodgers towels given away at that 2019 game.

The experience of watching the Dodgers, however, has changed dramatically for me. I’m no longer just a casual bandwagoner. A big part of my job is thinking about how close (or far) the next World Series is for the Orioles.

In this role, I’m forced to reconcile that what made being a Dodgers fan so breezy is what makes following the Orioles induce so much anxiety.

For Baltimore, a painful rebuild was necessary to be great. Now that the Orioles are in their window to contend, two postseason trips without a win are agonizing. We all hope that Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman and Anthony Santander can be Orioles for life, but we live with the worry that big-market, big-money teams like the Dodgers will eventually sweep up the talent the Orioles have painstakingly cultivated.

Only minutes went by Wednesday night before Corbin Burnes, the Orioles’ All-Star ace of this season, quote-tweeted eyeball emojis about the Dodgers’ championship. A realistic market forecast has Burnes making hundreds of millions of dollars in his pending free agency. At that cost, it seems more likely Burnes pitches for the Dodgers than the Orioles next season.

The thought brings me no joy whatsoever. It’s here where my personal schism with the Dodgers takes root.

Money wins championships in baseball. The Dodgers and Yankees were among the top five biggest payrolls this season. The last team to win a World Series without a top-10 payroll was the 2017 Astros, and Mike Elias’ lineage with that franchise is a key piece of the hope for Baltimore’s future. It helps, too, that owner David Rubenstein has foreshadowed an urgency to win, citing his age during an NPR interview.

But for the O’s, there are only so many cuts at a title. The contending window of this group may be three to five more years. But at some point that window slides closed. For a smaller market team like Baltimore, that necessitates a new cycle of tanking, scouring for draft picks and hoping your talent-development process is better than everyone else’s. You could argue the Orioles’ process under Elias has been better than everyone else’s — it just hasn’t yet resulted in a playoff win.

These circumstances produce a heartier kind of fan in Baltimore. The Orioles’ faithful know nothing of the endless sunshine of Southern California. Baltimoreans know winter. They know lean times. They know 100-loss seasons and living off the breadcrumbs of prospect stat lines in Bowie and Norfolk.

The first rays of sunshine to peek through Camden Yards in 2022 felt liberating. The return to the postseason in 2023 was rightly a moment of ecstatic celebration, of champagne showers and feel-good vibes.

The 2025 season, by comparison, will be played on pins and needles.

There will be pressure that the Dodgers fans of the world will never understand — the pressure to capitalize, to seize the moment just as the Orioles’ years of labor come into full bloom. There will be Herculean efforts by this front office to make moves that maximize this window, to give Baltimore its best shot at just the right time. It will take a mixture of savvy, grit and more than a little good luck to end a 41-year championship drought.

The buy-in for being a bandwagon fan of the Dodgers is relatively small, but so is the reward. A title bought and paid for can’t resonate quite as deeply as a title earned through years of discipline, sacrifice and fortune breaking your way.

I’ll admit watching the Dodgers beat the Yankees for the World Series made me smile. But if the Orioles find their way to the top again — when they find their way to the top again — it will bring tears to my eyes.

There will be nothing casual about it.