It still sounds vivid in my head.

During my summers spent dragging branches to the wood chipper and cleaning up yards on a tree crew in college, there always came a point when my most experienced colleague would declare the lawn was sufficiently raked or the driveway blown free-ish of debris.

“Good enough,” he’d yell, his voice cresting and extending on the first word. I still say it like that to this day when cleaning up around the house. It probably could have been better, but we’d met our expectations and it was time to hit the road.

There were often a few stray leaves and twigs and chunks of tree bark between our version of good enough — which meant the job was done — and the actual version of good enough, in which the yard was objectively and spotlessly clean.

That margin is much smaller in baseball, which feels particularly relevant as we prepare for this Orioles season. You can argue there’s no distinction.

Good enough to be five or six games over .500, with the expanded playoffs, is one thing. Being good enough to enter said playoffs as one of the league’s best teams, with the talent and right ingredients to reach and win the World Series, feels like another thing entirely. It’s just not. Once October hits, juggernauts go out early. Hot teams keep winning.

So, after one of the most active free-agency windows in franchise history helped the team supplement its homegrown foundation, good enough feels relative. Their moves were largely one-year deals for veterans whose downside risks are as minimal as their upsides. That’s certainly good enough for a team that hasn’t made any volume of meaningful signings in years, and a cynic might even point out they are the kinds of transactions a team simply looking to lower the heat for not making moves would execute.

It feels worthless to write off this entire season as prologue and declare that all we’ll really be measuring the Orioles on is whether they fare better in the playoffs than they have the last two years. The interceding six months, to me, will be about determining whether the Orioles — and what they do — are actually good enough or just meeting the lowest reasonable bar.

There’s good enough in the context of the Orioles as a franchise, one that general manager Mike Elias and his team pulled from decades of malaise. The 101-win 2023 team and 91-win 2024 team were the first back-to-back 90-win Orioles teams since the 1982 and world-champion 1983 Orioles and the first back-to-back playoff teams the franchise has boasted since 1996 and 1997.

Sitting here ahead of opening day just two seasons ago, a fan base that had endured embarrassingly bad baseball from rosters full of bad players by fixating on the coming generation of young stars was still pining for the future when all the homegrown players would represent the Orioles’ core. Adley Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson, Jordan Westburg, Colton Cowser, Heston Kjerstad and Jackson Holliday, plus holdovers Cedric Mullins and Ryan Mountcastle, are all here now.

And yet it feels as if excitement over a team built around them is relatively muted. This was the whole idea of the rebuild as Elias and his team envisioned it, homegrown lineup pillars. We’ve seen a healthy version of this group be among the best lineups in baseball. This year, especially in the early part of the season, we’ll find out whether they’re collectively good enough to carry the team with a pitching staff that has questions to answer.

Those questions are well worn. The Orioles survived 2024, with most of their starters not named Corbin Burnes at one point ending up on the injured list, because of Burnes’ quality and durability. They couldn’t replace him at the top of the rotation and instead spread their resources around to reinforce the floor of the starting group with mid-rotation(ish) veterans who have been reliable for years.

It’s not a lot of pressure just to be good enough for a staff, starters and relievers, who individually can probably be described as such. If they all pitch to form, this is a playoff team, and one with relatively fresh, higher-ceiling pitchers in Kyle Bradish and Tyler Wells supplementing the group.

If not, the pitching staff’s inability to hold up its end of the bargain will be an indictment of the offseason Elias and his team had. We know from years of experience with Elias and now one year with David Rubenstein as the team’s control person that they’re not going to spend more than they think is right long term to bring in someone who might make the team better now. That’s not a bad philosophy in theory and might not even be bad in practice, provided the lower-cost alternatives assembled do what they’re supposed to.

We aren’t talking about the soundest evaluative processes if the end result is, “If it works, then it was a good idea,” but that’s kind of where these Orioles are, for better or worse. You can point out how much more they’re spending or all the ways they’re using Rubenstein’s resources to do things differently, and the lack of a $300 million free-agent contract or a long-term extension for a homegrown star will still be the rebuttal. (I know this because this is how I spent the winter.)

Without the boost in sentiment one of those big moves would provide, they’re playing this season through a lens of skepticism that this will work or that their plan to win is good enough.

That has less to do with what’s on the field and more about what’s off it. I feel comfortable saying there’s philosophical alignment between Rubenstein and Elias, not just because they’ve said as much but because of the owner’s own comments. Still, Rubenstein and his partners can at any moment decide they don’t care about the 2029 Orioles and pursue a path of near-term-oriented moves. That would mean, by extension, they’ll have taken a view on Elias’ overall methods and philosophy and whether they are good enough.

We have seen him beat himself up enough in media sessions to know he’s constantly working through the outcomes of those processes, sometimes in real time, though he rarely wavers from an overall conviction in what he does. But anything other than playoff success this year probably brings him to a decision point with manager Brandon Hyde, who was certainly good enough at his job to get the Orioles out of their rebuild and to this point. It again begs the question as to whether this point is good enough.

And so it goes that a season built around the very thing five-plus years of losing baseball promised us would make it better instead becomes a referendum on the process itself and October results. It’s not on me to say whether that’s fair. That’s just where we are — and, as ever, the easiest way around it is to win.