There was always going to be a cost to the Orioles’ disastrous start to the season, with Brandon Hyde’s job and my own temporary sanity among the most prominent casualties to date.

Now, as the team has suddenly found its winning ways again, the price for that start is dwindling but omnipresent. You’ll know what I’m talking about.

After every win comes the moment when you check the standings and start doing the mental math of what it will take for this team to play meaningful baseball again.

Its record and its chances of a real resurgence look better by the day, certainly better than they did a week ago, though it’s still a long shot. Feel free to ignore anyone who tells you to memory hole the first two months of the season and enjoy it, and similarly all those who are going to point out they’re in a pocket of the schedule of teams playing worse baseball than they are right now. They’re missing the point.

Just as it’s a long process for the Orioles to claw back to .500 and beyond, it’s not going to be a quick one for anyone watching them to go 10 toes in on a team that did all kinds of damage before this six-game winning streak.

This has been nice to watch. It might be the start of something really remarkable. There’s just not a lot of precedent for what the Orioles are trying to do, so anything short of them actually completing one of the most drastic turnarounds imaginable is going to be met guardedly, if not outright cautiously.

Still, let’s admit the obvious. This has been different, not just because they are winning but how they’re winning. On Wednesday the Orioles fell behind in the bottom of the sixth and rallied for the lead in the top of the seventh, a rare late comeback that in this club’s recent heyday would have felt inevitable. They replicated that Thursday when they fell behind in the fifth and pulled ahead in the sixth.

Those types of wins mean something and are possible when games are still close in those action innings. Because we aren’t talking about an Orioles offense that’s firing on all cylinders, to be close at that stage of the game has recently come down to the starting pitchers.

It remains the case that they are the bellwether for this team. The Orioles are 24-16 when their starters allow three runs or fewer. Of the remaining 21 games in which the starter yielded four or more runs, they have won only once, on opening weekend in Toronto when Dean Kremer allowed five runs in a win March 29.

The Orioles haven’t had many of those types of games lately, mostly because the rotation has gone from a liability to the team’s strength. Because the pitchers aren’t losing games in the first few innings, the Orioles are finding ways to win more of them late.

Consider the following: Since Cionel Pérez allowed five runs in the seventh inning of the Orioles’ 19-5 loss to the Red Sox on May 23 (and was subsequently designated for assignment), they’ve played a dozen games in which there would have been no occasion for Pérez — who became an early-inning white flag and often made whatever deficit he inherited worse — to pitch.

Matt Bowman, ostensibly the current last man in the bullpen and the one they’d call about in such a situation now, hasn’t pitched in over a week. Another frequent early-game reliever from April — Bryan Baker — now seems like the team’s primary setup man, with a pair of saves on days when the increasingly impressive Félix Bautista isn’t available.

So things are certainly stabilized on the mound, and the arrow is pointing up on a handful of important hitters, including Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson. Jordan Westburg might get to make what I’m sure is an incredibly rare trip from Louisville, Kentucky (where Triple-A Norfolk is this week), to Sacramento, California, joining Colton Cowser as part of a welcome group of reinforcements (with Ramón Laureano and Gary Sánchez on the way) that can collectively make the Orioles almost whole again.

Cedric Mullins returning from his hamstring issue during this next homestand would complete the group in the near term, given Tyler O’Neill might be farther away and we’re looking at an extended Ryan Mountcastle absence.

If this was March and we hadn’t seen most of those hitters be part of an Orioles lineup that was constantly letting the team down and wasn’t hitting enough to overcome all the poor starts on the mound, the idea of this group being whole would be much more encouraging to the masses. Being more constructive on this offense than most, even given how rough things looked, I still find that encouraging.

It’s hard to imagine the starters pitching like this forever, so the hitters have to do better than they have to overcome what’s likely to be a return to earth for that group. But the Orioles can accumulate wins that way, too.

Above all else, that’s what this is about: winning enough games to get to .500 and get back into the playoff race and get this team’s credibility back. All you have to do, even amid all this winning, is look at their record and hit the wild-card tab on the standings to understand the amount of wins required to do that.

That’s the result of how this season started, and it’s the cloud hanging over this winning streak and everything else involving these Orioles. You always know the sun is behind it. This is just a moment where it glows more brightly at the thin spots and edges, and even if the clouds never fully go away, you notice how much brighter it feels in that instance. And it feels like hope.