If you are a Baltimore Ravens fan who is feeling happy for Mike Macdonald today, you probably also — deep down — feel a glowing ember of jealousy.

Watching the Seahawks trample Drake Maye and the Patriots for six sacks recalled the overwhelming Ravens defense of 2023 — a unit that led the NFL in both sacks and takeaways and humbled some of the league’s most high-powered offenses.

Watching Macdonald hold the shimmering Lombardi Trophy and call out Seattle’s fan base, “the 12s,” for being “the best fans in the world” sent a stab through Baltimore fans’ hearts.

Before Seattle knew Macdonald’s name, you all thought, we loved him first.

Losing a talented coordinator to a head coaching job is the way of the NFL’s circle of coaching life. It happened to the Ravens before Macdonald, and it has happened since (we’ll see you soon, Todd Monken). But Macdonald crossed a threshold that no other coordinator under John Harbaugh had ever reached — taking his promotion to head coach all the way to a Super Bowl victory.

There are plenty of Baltimoreans who will swear up and down they saw this coming. By achieving championship success just two seasons removed from his time in Baltimore, Macdonald might forever loom as one of the Ravens’ greatest what-ifs.

What if Mike Macdonald had never gotten away? If he had never left, would it be the Ravens up on that stage, celebrating the franchise’s third Super Bowl win right now?

It’s a question that has no satisfying answer, in part because back in 2024 there were no real grounds to keep him in Baltimore. To relitigate the past, you have to live in the conditions of the time. Macdonald was the hottest candidate of the cycle, and he was going to get a head coaching job after leading an elite unit.

The more tantalizing question: What if the Ravens had fired Harbaugh to promote Macdonald?

At 36, Macdonald was already considered a savant of modern defense, developing concepts that would find a lot of imitation in the coming years. He found ways to create pressure without blitzes, and keeping quarterbacks off-balance was a hallmark of his tenure. Joe Burrow, Brock Purdy, Jared Goff and Trevor Lawrence crashed against the Ravens’ defense like stray ships onto the rocky shore.

But there was no realistic world in which the Ravens dismissed Harbaugh to promote his assistant, a move that would have been shockingly bold by any standard. Not only did the team have the top-ranked defense that year, they also had the No. 4 offense, revitalized under Todd Monken — a Harbaugh hire.

Doling out all the credit for a 13-4 season to Macdonald would have been disingenuous at best.

I wrote at the time: “Fire Harbaugh after getting the second No. 1 seed in five years, when the Ravens were a score away from possibly going to the Super Bowl? That is reactionary decision-making at its worst. ... It would be bad business for the Ravens to dismiss a head coach who has established a consistent culture for two decades to hire a coordinator who is promising but still a gamble.”

I stand by that assessment, which I still believe was the best one owner Steve Bisciotti could have made at the time. Firing Harbaugh after one of his best seasons would not only have been a wild-card decision, it would have likely drawn intense criticism from coaches across the industry.

In Seattle, Macdonald’s first season was uneven, even if his underlying vision was pretty clear. He had a bit of a runway to figure out the ins and outs of an entirely new role with the Seahawks — and by Year 2 he was thriving.

If Macdonald had replaced a fired Harbaugh in 2024, he would not have enjoyed any of that learning curve. He would have had to outdo his predecessor immediately by at least going to a Super Bowl in Year 1, and he would have faced weekly scrutiny about whether he was close to that goal.

We know now that Harbaugh’s star would indeed keep declining in Baltimore, while Macdonald would become Harbaugh’s first assistant to go on to win a Super Bowl as a head coach. Both of those outcomes defied the odds, if we’re being honest.

Like Macdonald moved on, it’s onto Baltimore to try to move on, too. As prescient as some of Macdonald’s biggest fans might have been, keeping him with the Ravens was always pie-in-the-sky. Timing is half the battle, and with Macdonald, the timing just wasn’t right.

If the Ravens scuffled a few more points together in the second half against Kansas City two years ago, they may have made the most of the time they had with the brilliant young coordinator. Not winning a championship with the stacked 2023 team — ranked by DVOA as one of the most dominant of all time — was the real missed opportunity.

The question Ravens fans should really spend time asking themselves is not “what if” on Macdonald, but “could it be” with Jesse Minter — a hire made squarely in the mold of the Ravens’ defensive coordinator who got away.

Like Macdonald, Minter is a creative young defensive mind who has leapfrogged up the coaching ladder extraordinarily quickly. Like Macdonald, Minter has drawn rave reviews from the players and coaches he’s worked with in the past — very nearly all of the Chargers’ roster made sentimental social media shoutouts when he left for Baltimore, something not every coach inspires (what was, for example, the player outcry here when Monken left for Cleveland?).

Like Macdonald, Minter plans on calling his own defensive plays. According to The Athletic, Macdonald is the first head coach to win the Super Bowl while calling his own defense — an increasingly popular style for defensive head coaches. Second-time coach Robert Saleh has announced a similar intention in Tennessee after not calling plays for the Jets.

Minter feels giving up playcalling would be giving up one of his greatest strengths as a coach. Macdonald’s success is evidence that you can win as a head coach while calling a defense, two time-consuming roles.

During the hiring process, I wondered if Macdonald going to Seattle would affect the Ravens’ decision-making — if hiring Minter, who most resembled the candidate Macdonald was two years ago, would be their way of trying to rewrite the past.

But Minter, who acknowledges his similarities to (and influences from) Macdonald while not leaning too far into the comparison, deserves a shot to make the most of the future.

It’s best that he and the Ravens — and their fans — keep their eyes trained ahead rather than look back and keep wondering, “what if?”