Preakness Saturday in 2022 was the day the Orioles brought up Adley Rutschman, the game’s unquestioned top prospect and the crown jewel of their rebuild, and in doing so announced to the world that their losing days were coming to an end.

They’ve won a lot since then, yet three years later, this third Saturday in May marks another transition. Brandon Hyde’s firing, far from a panacea for this incredibly disappointing club, marks the first time the Orioles have truly acted like the winning team they’re supposed to be.

They stuck to the plan for an astonishing 6 1/2 years, but it has gone awry, and you can’t start winning again until you stop losing. You can’t just stay the course forever. You can’t look at this as something that was going to fix itself with the right processes and beliefs in place.

Maybe it would have. Who knows? Winning teams don’t wait after stretches like this. And, sad as it is for Hyde to take the fall, it took this long only because dismissing him runs counter to everything that’s happened since his hire. Close the book on the Hyde era and that line of thinking around Orioles baseball along with it.

The teams the Orioles want to be peers with in terms of October success wouldn’t think twice to do this, fair or not.

General manager Mike Elias has said on multiple occasions this month that this wasn’t on Hyde. Thirty-nine players plus dozens of front office members and coaches share the blame. So do injuries, bad luck and so much else.

We are long past the point of patience and understanding, though. This went on for too long, this broad and pervasive underperformance. This collective inability to stop the losing. This crisis of confidence for a team that a year ago was among baseball’s best and moves farther away from that with every unconscionable loss.

Hyde’s portion of the responsibility certainly wouldn’t be the largest on the Orioles’ proverbial plate. He is eating this nonetheless, because even one more day of everyone pushing their food around the plate and hoping it might start to look different was too tough to stomach.

Maybe Saturday will be the start of one of the most extreme in-season turnarounds a baseball team could have. More likely, it will simply shock the team into playing a little better. Undeniably, this will be remembered as the day when, to a larger extent than they ever have before, the Elias-era Orioles stopped doing things their way, stopped trusting the process and shifted their focus to the here and now.

Friday night’s particularly disheartening game and all the losses that preceded it gave them no choice. It was pretty well understood that this team would have to just survive its early injuries and then take the chance to coalesce into a World Series contender in the second half.

There might not be a ladder big enough in the world to help the Orioles out of this 15-28 hole. But there’s no reason to keep drilling deeper. Firing the manager is the break-glass, emergency shutoff button. You can wonder, probably fairly, what took so long to smash it. Elias was probably rightly worried about bloodying himself too badly, given this is his roster that he built with the new ownership group’s blessing.

Elias’ hands aren’t clean now, and just because this was probably an incredibly painful personal decision doesn’t disqualify it from being the least messy option for himself and the organization he has meticulously built since the end of 2018.

In the last two years, the Orioles made major changes to personnel on both the pitching and hitting sides of the coaching staff that very clearly solidified the top-to-bottom, integrated philosophies in those spaces that Elias and his front office have iterated over the years.

The voices changed, but the message, principles and processes didn’t. Hyde was the major league manager and those departments operated independent of him. He was responsible for winning games, and now that change of voice is happening in the manager’s office with Tony Mansolino, a respected and energetic coach who has a great rapport with many of the team’s key players.

If their hitting philosophies or pitching program or roster-building methods had worked better this year, they’d not be in position to need to fire the manager. There have been small moments when it felt Hyde was at odds with some of them this year.

To name a few: his early-season comments about how his roster featured right-handed hitters who needed to play against lefties, even as they underperformed; an odd remark ahead of Brandon Young’s debut about how some of the team’s video staff and pitching personnel liked him; Thursday’s rebuke of exit velocity as “great and sexy” but “not winning baseball.”

All that feels beside the point, though. When you are meant to win but lose as often and at times embarrassingly as the Orioles have, the impacts are manifold. For one, context is slowly stripped away. Understanding wanes.

We’re left with this: You don’t get to the point where the Orioles were supposed to be this season easily, or by accident. The longer the losing continued and nothing changed, the more it was going to feel like the front office was taking that success for granted, that just because the hard times were through then good times would be the norm. You can’t expect to be good then allow such a bad product to persist for this long.

Maybe there are a lot of cities where baseball teams are considered contenders where the roster building and processes that led to this point would never have been acceptable. There are none where the manner of so many of the 28 losses on the Orioles’ ledger would be tolerated.

And, at least now, this is one of those places. Hyde’s own culpability is beside the point. Zach Eflin was right to say that this happened because the Orioles sucked. If they continued to do so under Hyde, we’d be talking about the same outcome. Elias has now played the one major card he had left to try to change things. And he was more patient than most would have been to do so.