There’s a lot to process watching Toronto be the last team standing in the AL East. I’ll sum up my main thought this way: It was a lot more fun not having to take the Blue Jays seriously.

But all it takes is one October to make good on all kinds of promise, and that’s what they’re doing — leveraging the home-field advantage they earned by winning the American League East for the first time in a decade to eliminate the Yankees and return to the ALCS.

To say this is what a lot of people in this division have been afraid of might be a stretch; the Blue Jays were good for many years without winning the division or even a playoff game. They just hadn’t reached the expectations set in 2019 with the arrival of a core led by Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette & Co.

That’s at once good and bad for an Orioles team that, if not fully assuming the cloak of unrealized potential and a wasted competitive window these Blue Jays wore for so long, is at least trying it on. On balance, I’m leaning bad.

Mostly, that’s because you have to take Toronto seriously from now on, and you can’t just assume it won’t deliver when it matters. The Yankees and Red Sox, if we’re being honest, always reside in that category where the division is concerned.

The Blue Jays aren’t super young, but they’re very talented. Given the long-term commitments they’ve made, they just need their farm system to support the major league team with depth and for it to continue to generate high-caliber pitching, which it has done of late.

No matter what happens in the rest of these playoffs, this team will be perceived differently. Even before this run, you could look at the roster and like a lot.

They’ve done a good job acquiring rotation strength via trade and free agency, with old friend Kevin Gausman the top-of-the-rotation stalwart we always knew he could be, plus Chris Bassitt and Jose Berrios yielding strong returns.

George Springer had a renaissance season, and many of their homegrown hitters are fueling the lineup beyond him. Guerrero, who had a monster division series against the Yankees, is particularly illustrative of that.

Put it all together and this Blue Jays team, which has a perfect mix of veterans worth paying for and homegrown talent they’ve built around, has staying power. It is a dark enough cloud that it’s going to shade out any bright spots the Orioles can take from how it happened — even though there are many, in particular Guerrero.

He’s had a year worth exploring, considering how this season went in Baltimore and some of the long-term concerns over the club’s homegrown contingent of hitters (outside of the youngest, Samuel Basallo) not being signed long term.

As the Orioles and their fans grapple with the volatility of performance that’s baked into young hitters, Guerrero has put people in Toronto through the same thing. He was second in MVP voting at age 22 in 2021 with a 1.002 OPS, 48 home runs and a 6.3 fWAR. In 2022, he had an .818 OPS and 3.3 fWAR, then .788 and 1.2 fWAR in 2023 before returning to dominance with a .940 OPS and 5.3 fWAR in 2024.

That was a pivotal year because it set him up for showdown negotiations over a long-term contract extension, with Guerrero’s club control ending after this season. He signed a 14-year, $500 million deal in April to keep him in Toronto for the rest of his career.

His arc is where a lot of the hope for Orioles fans comes in. The game is rife with examples of up-and-down trajectories for young stars, with little rhyme or reason as to why other than the game is random and difficult. Talent is talent, though, and it doesn’t go away forever. It also shows how maturation, which the Orioles need, can help playoff performance.

And, most important, his signing a deal that kept him from free agency just months before he reached it means there’s no reason to schedule send-off parties for the Orioles’ unsigned stars just yet. Guerrero isn’t represented by Scott Boras, a complicating factor for many of the young players here, but it’s a precedent that such a deal can happen outside of the traditional window these extensions are typically reached in.

Then there’s the part where Guerrero was quite good last year while the Blue Jays weren’t. Toronto went from winning 74 games last year to winning 94 and the division this year, and it did so with only modest tweaks to its coaching staff. That’s a case for continuity where these Orioles are concerned, if the front office wants to keep interim manager Tony Mansolino and his staff in place, but also points to how quickly things can flip back positively from year to year.

Taken all together, there’s a lot to look at for encouragement for the Orioles. It’s also encouragement from a team that is going to be one of many impediments to them returning to the playoffs and reaching their goals of competing for the division and beyond next year.

I think that part is far more significant.