It’s a tall ask for these Orioles to beat a lefty these days, let alone the undisputed best in the game. The opportunity to do so and, in the process, win a series against the league’s best team and earn more credibility in a single night than any one game should carry, was a significant one.

They lost, and that’s not the disappointing part. They’ve done that plenty this year and, honestly, whatever. But it remains as true as ever that if you’re going to do the hardest thing imaginable — make the playoffs after starting 15-32 and firing your manager in the process — you’re going to have to do a lot of hard things along the way.

The opportunities will keep coming to show they’re anything other than the losing team we’ve seen for two-plus months. We can keep lighting those candles of hope. They’ll come in handy when it’s time for this team’s vigil, one that’s growing more and more inevitable with each loss.

Every chance like this to do something great and change your season that passes unseized means you remain who you are.

Right now, this is a team whose woes against left-handed pitching are fatal no matter whose left hand the ball is coming out of.

I understand it’s harsh to judge a team with a collective .562 OPS off lefties for not beating Tarik Skubal — a southpaw in possession of the AL Cy Young Award and who entered carrying a 2.16 ERA with a 0.82 WHIP. He lost his first two games of the season, and Thursday turned out to be his sixth scoreless start of the year.

He’s an unbelievable talent and, as an aside, the idea that Detroit would have traded him at any point for any return — as many here hoped last summer — feels so unrealistic that it’s funny to have had even one conversation about it in the moment.

What is realistic, though, is that a relatively healthy Orioles team with Colton Cowser and Jordan Westburg back (though still no Tyler O’Neill or Gary Sánchez, two players meant to help against lefties) could put its best foot forward on a night like this and prove in the most emphatic way that this team was ready to make its run.

Think about it. The Orioles’ collective OPS off lefties would have still started with a five if they’d done damage against Skubal, but beating him would have been a pelt on their clubhouse wall to be proud of. Honestly, beating the Tigers two out of three no matter who pitched would have been a feat, and not just because 11 games under .500 feels better than 13.

They’re going to have to beat all comers if this season is going to recover: good teams, bad teams, aces, jabronis and everyone in between. You can’t just tip your hat to the Skubals of the world when you’ve lost this much already, though I understand why interim manager Tony Mansolino did. It’s just that you have to do the hard things, too, and the Orioles’ résumé doesn’t have many examples of that.

Early in the season, it was really hard to stay engaged on offense and defense when the games got out of reach early, so they didn’t. It’s hard to pitch without a full spring training, so Kyle Gibson’s four starts were disasters. It was hard for everyone to process Brandon Hyde’s firing, so the losing continued apace in the immediate aftermath.

We heard last week that it was hard to play in Sacramento, so the momentum from their six-game winning streak to begin the month ended there. Because of that and so many other hard things, the Orioles have to basically win two-thirds of their games the rest of the way to get to the playoffs.

That’s going to be hard to do, to say the least. The Orioles can win this upcoming series against the Angels and have treaded water this week and feel fine about it, I suppose, though they’ll have to beat a lefty to do so.

With everything working against them — the calendar, other teams, basic arithmetic — it’s the unquantifiable things that they’ll need to keep the flame burning. Winning Thursday would have been one win that felt like a lot more than that.

Instead it felt like, painfully, more of the same.