Orioles manager Brandon Hyde is right in saying it’s difficult but necessary for his young stars — a group that accounts for most of the team’s lineup on a nightly basis — to move on from a tough game or a tough week and mentally set themselves up to be as good as everyone knows they are.

That mindset above everything else might be the path for them to get back to their best baseball and perhaps will allow the stop-start nature of this team’s performance of late to smooth out a little bit.

There’s a problem that, I think, might endure long after the team improves on that front. It’s going to be a lot harder for anyone outside that clubhouse to do the same.

The damage among fans, commentators, observers and just about everyone else might already be done. And truthfully, combined with the end of 2024, it’s going to be hard for even the best version of this Orioles team to move past the inconsistencies it has shown to start the season.

It will be a successful season if the Orioles can overcome this slow start and still get where they want to go, which is to be playing in October. They’ll have to be really good for the sour taste of their struggles to go away.

In simply writing this, I suppose this is me saying that this perception of the Orioles matters. I’m not sure it truly does, but it’s worth addressing.

If the team is 20 games over .500 in August, with Kyle Bradish and Grayson Rodriguez making an impact on the rotation and Felix Bautista’s fastball back around 100 mph at the end of games and Gunnar Henderson’s OPS north of .900 and Adley Rutschman’s production at his early-career levels, the skeptics’ calls will be hard to hear over the excitement this team is generating.

We know that because we’ve seen what that looks like: packed ballparks every weekend, downtown buzzing with Orioles fans and enthusiasm surging through the fan base on a nightly basis.

But we also know how deep scars can be here. A whole new group of people whose last names are not Angelos now own the team, and in its first full season they have the club’s payroll near its record high. And yet there seems to be an inability out there to realize that things are a lot different than they were.

The Orioles’ regular-season success over the last few years has been significantly dampened by what happened in the playoffs — five losses and two straight sweeps. Henderson isn’t even in salary arbitration yet and has three more full seasons left with the Orioles before free agency, and his departure is already being mourned because so many others were allowed to leave in their primes.

Some things truly are hard to get over. And, based on the first three weeks of the season, this slow start might be harder to overcome off the field than on it. It’s simply hard to be excited about some of the inconsistencies this team has demonstrated, and the knowledge that they have this in them is going to be durable.

Punctuate a five-game winning streak with a stinker in which the right-handed-hitting bench brigade comes in and produces nothing, and it’ll be hard to feel anything but “here we go again.” Every Charlie Morton start from this point forward, whether he steadies the ship or not, is going to have the potential to be a referendum on how he’s not Corbin Burnes.

All this was probably inescapable given how the last two seasons ended, but there’s definitely no getting around it now. These three weeks might ultimately be a small aberration in a season that ends up exceeding everyone’s expectations. They also represented the opportunity to put some distance between this year’s club and last year’s collapse.

That certainly has not happened, unless you were loud about last year’s offense being too reliant on the long ball. (If that’s the case, congratulations and hope you’re having more fun now!) Otherwise, the reality that the Orioles went six months between meaningful games with plenty of roster changes feels lost in the court of public opinion. While acknowledging some of these opinions, particularly the pessimistic ones, are always going to be out there, the chance to change minds is gone.

They can chip away at it with the only thing anyone cares about: winning. Win a series or two. Get to .500 and keep going. Just looking like a team that has the chance to win every night will mean it does more often than not, and the repairs can occur from there.

Now, though, it feels like the damage is done. The good news is, as long as the damage in the standings is reversible, none of it will matter. That part will overpower anything else.