Before the will they/won’t they over the Orioles’ top hitting prospects being used as trade chips to bolster the major league pitching staff took over as the leading dialogue around the team, the long-running conversation that gripped the media and fans alike had to do with a player making his way back to Baltimore this weekend: Manny Machado.

The Orioles’ last homegrown superstar before this current crop debuted at age 19 and was in the prime of his career as he neared free agency in 2018, and in the year-plus leading up to his trade in July 2018 to the Los Angeles Dodgers, he and several other of the team’s brightest stars were the subject of all kinds of trade speculation.

At the time, as those players neared free agency and the Orioles’ chances of winning a championship with the core that brought joy back to Camden Yards under Buck Showalter diminished, the browbeating that they should be traded to realize some value for them was constant. The competitive window dictated it.

For completely different reasons, the idea that the Orioles can’t keep all of their coveted hitting prospects and thus have to trade one or more of them has similarly calcified. When you see five young, major-league-caliber infielders, it’s easy to envision turning one or two into a good starting pitcher. Maybe the Orioles will do that. They just don’t have to do anything.

All that said, it’s not going to be long before the cycle simply flips and the perception that this group’s competitive window is closing and some of these players need to be traded takes hold. It’s a dangerous game and one we’ve seen before.

It’s crazy to think Machado has been wearing another team’s colors since the 2018 All-Star Game, when the whole world knew his trade to the Dodgers was imminent. It was also over a year in the making.

With the Orioles never quite rebounding from the crushing 2016 wild-card-game loss in Toronto and scuffling through the 2017 season, the idea of winning with that group — which also featured Adam Jones, Chris Davis, Mark Trumbo, Jonathan Schoop and a group of starting pitchers whose names would make many flinch — was increasingly fleeting.

So it started at the 2017 trade deadline with rumors of potential trades of Zack Britton and Brad Brach. The thinking was they’d be worth more to an acquiring team for two pennant chases and playoff runs than one, though neither was moved. That offseason, at the winter meetings in Washington, a potential trade of Machado was the hottest topic around. The Orioles entertained offers but held onto him.

All the while, there was almost this pressure from the most prominent voices in the game to move said players. They looked at where the Orioles were competitively and (perhaps rightfully) deduced there was more to be gained in a trade than by keeping these players. There’s incentive for media and talking heads to beat that particular drum, of course.

Part of that is, well, everyone needs something to talk about, write about and tweet about. The simplest ideas — that the Orioles can’t win so they should trade their good players, or the Orioles can win and have good prospects so they should trade them — are the easiest to present.

Those 2017 and 2018 Orioles bucked convention and kept adding because they had no other choice. There wasn’t much of a farm system to speak of, they had an aging roster, and they were probably going to be in for the lean years that ultimately followed whether they tried for one last ride or not.

These Orioles do have a choice — many of them. They can keep all their good young players and hope the pitching staff they have gets them to October and comes through, because talent plays in October and few teams have as much at the plate as the Orioles, both now and in the future. They can package two important young players for near-term pitching help, and if those two players aren’t available down the line to step up the way Colton Cowser did in left field in April or Connor Norby is about to do now at second base, so be it. Or they can make the big swing and hope not to regret it.

They could have traded three big-time prospects for Shohei Ohtani last July and ended up getting absolutely nothing out of it. They could do what they did with Corbin Burnes and pay a big price for a big talent on the mound and win the World Series because of it.

Machado’s presence against this backdrop is perhaps fitting. His trade kicked off this rebuild, with Dan Duquette pledging the Orioles would upgrade all the things his successor ultimately has — domestic and international scouting, analytics and player development. Machado came back a year later with the Padres the same week 2019 No. 1 pick Adley Rutschman signed his professional contract, and a clearer separation point between the Orioles’ past and future doesn’t exist.

Now that bright future has been realized in so many ways. The elite talent pipeline Elias promised has produced all kinds of elite talent, and that simple fact doesn’t mean the Orioles can’t keep it all and just be an elite offensive team for the rest of the decade. They don’t have to keep it, of course. They’ll do whatever they think is best for the organization, and hopefully that includes something to help the 2024 Orioles.

The only compulsory aspect of any of this is they have to do it by Tuesday — and they have to live with what happens beyond then.