Home openers, be they the first game of the season or the fifth, always mean a little more. They’re lively, they’re communal, and good or bad, they’re the beginning of something.

If the Orioles give what they did Monday — scoring in bunches, enough pitching to high-five at the end — often enough going forward, Camden Yards will be the kind of place it was Monday and through the summer to come.

The way this one ended, though, with Félix Bautista wobbling through his first home outing since August 2023, might be more instructive than anything else for what’s to come.

“It might take a little while,” manager Brandon Hyde said. He was talking about Bautista, but there’s an overwhelming sense growing as this Orioles season starts up that the same can be said of the team at large.

Consider that Gunnar Henderson, the team’s star shortstop, is rehabbing his rib injury with the Triple-A Norfolk Tides instead of receiving the thunderous cheers he deserved on his orange carpet introduction Monday. Consider Colton Cowser is now out six to eight weeks, at least, with a fractured thumb, and Albert Suárez became the seventh Orioles pitcher on the injured list Sunday.

I’m not saying the Orioles are still giving cursed vibes, but if you’d told me Monday morning that the afternoon’s game would turn on a face-plant on the infield, I’d have figured it was an Oriole who was the victim.

It wasn’t — it was Red Sox third baseman Alex Bregman as the Orioles’ eighth-inning rally got started — and it helped build a large enough lead for Bautista, who threw 14 balls to 12 strikes in allowing two runs on two hits with two walks, to be spared an incredibly unkind return to the Camden Yards mound.

Hyde’s calls for patience with Bautista are only natural. He acknowledged that he’s “not going to be perfect — almost like he was” before the injury, which is the right expectation management, given the Orioles want him to be healthy and at his best down the stretch.

He’s on the mound working back to his best in real time, and Henderson should be back shortly, but increasingly there’s a lot of on-field impact being deferred to the second half of the season otherwise.

Cowser’s timeline seems to mean a return in late-May would feel like a fortunate outcome. Grayson Rodriguez seems like he’s going to need a long ramp-up, the same kind that Kyle Gibson, Chayce McDermott, Andrew Kittredge and Trevor Rogers are in the thick of right now. Beyond them, Kyle Bradish and Tyler Wells are on their rehab progressions from Tommy John surgery, hopeful to make an impact in the second half.

This time last year, the Orioles were carrying Tony Kemp on their roster, because the way the schedule worked out in the first week of the season, they’d need to use all of their right-handed hitting infielders against opponents’ lefty starters and thus wouldn’t need top prospect Jackson Holliday on the roster. Every win mattered, I was told, as they tried to keep pace with the Yankees.

There was no such decision with a young player to be made this year. The Orioles’ roster was built to have a ton of support, and the resources of David Rubenstein’s ownership group were used to bring in a bunch of sturdy veterans whose output can be relied upon.

It felt clear all winter long, as the roster was being put together in this fashion, that they were trying to cover the possibility that a repeat of last year’s second half would mean key contributors on the mound and at the plate are out for long stretches. That’s been challenged from the start this year, and at 3-2 entering the season’s first day off, the roster has met those challenges.

It would be disingenuous to say, with a roster that still boasts multiple All-Stars in the lineup and in the bullpen, that they’re some kind of ragtag bunch. This is still a really good team, and they’re going to win more games than they’ll lose even before the reinforcements arrive.

Good teams win when they’re not at their best. Bautista helped them do that Monday, and that at least set the home opener up to be the start of something good. To me, it’s almost the start of a prologue. These games matter. The Orioles need to win them to be playing in October.

Perhaps it’s the best compliment I could give that as we wait for this team to be truly at its best, as Hyde said of Bautista, it might take a while.