The Royals know they’re being tested. It’s time to see the answer.

A major-league baseball season can feel like a lie. Because you know it’s long — 162 games over six months, a book that’s written a page at a time without knowing the ending. But, man, when you put your heart and all your waking hours into this each day that brings a winner and a loser can feel like a referendum.

This season started out like a dream. Remember that? The Royals had the best record in baseball as recently as a few days ago. They won the moments. Sal Perez won one game with a pickoff throw, another with a double, and a third with a home run.

Opening day, remember that? The Royals trailed by five before their first at-bat, then tied it, then fell behind again, then came back again. Mike Matheny, managing the Royals in front of fans for the first time, said it was the kind of win that could carry a team for a month.

Here we are, a little more than a month later, and the Royals are on a losing streak that feels like it could last a month.

They took a brutal loss on Wednesday. Mercy. Missed calls, ejections, blown leads. Matheny — he’s as honest and open as a manager can be — called it the worst loss of the year. Said the Royals were being tested, and he looked forward to seeing them respond, but then the next day they had no runs and four hits and three double plays — no wins in five games.

Matheny wanted a different response, of course. He was asked how much of a 4-0 loss to Cleveland on Thursday he saw as a carryover from the night before.

“That’s a valid question,” he said. “We like to say we take the wins and we’re able to take the positives and move forward and realize we’ve got to do something again today. We’d like to say the same with the losses, but sometimes it’s a whole lot easier to talk about than actually put into play. But we’ve got a lot of baseball to go this season.”

This five-game losing streak spans two division rivals, an entire cycle through the rotation, and a lot of sloppy baseball. The rotation has been inconsistent, at best. The bullpen has gone from strength to liability. The offense has not been good enough, and the defense unreliable.

The Royals fell out of first place on Thursday. That’s significant. The White Sox are here for the weekend. That feels like a test.

Even in the best-case scenario, the Royals were always going to have a stretch or two like this. This is a roster with significant strengths, but also the sorts of flaws that tend to cluster. The margins are small, which means a failure in one spot often craters another.

The Royals hit eight balls 99.9 miles per hour or harder, a collection of scorchers that collectively amounted to two singles and two double-play grounders.

The season is a lie. You know it’s long, but each moment feels so big. You know that every time a team makes the playoffs the players talk about adversity.

You also know that every team that finishes at the bottom of the standings talks about adversity, too.

“Did you think it was going to be peaches and roses all year?” second baseball Whit Merrifield said. “You know we’re going to go through something like this at some point. You find out a lot about a team, and the men in there, when you get punched in the mouth. We got punched in the mouth this past series, and we’ll see how we can respond. We’ll see what kind of team we’ve got, see what kind of men we’ve got in there.”

One hundred and sixty two games is a preposterously long season, and it’s one of baseball’s charms. Seasons are not won or lost based on a night or a moment, but instead on the broader dynamics. It’s about which teams can be consistently competitive, shaving off the slumps and stretching the heaters just a few more days.

Baseball seasons are also about how teams respond to moments, and about which teams can avoid letting one loss become two. This week, the Royals look like a team that let one loss become two, and perhaps more.

We’ve seen limp Royals teams in the past that could spin a six-game losing streak out of thin air. This Royals team believes it’s better. Believes it’s more.

The confidence is not without justification. They have men who’ve led the league in stolen bases and home runs. They have defensive wizzes and 100 mph fastballs and wicked sliders. As much as anything else, they have winners.

That’s been a central theme of how the Royals have tried to convince the world they are here to stay. They talk of how they have 10 men who’ve played in a World Series, and nine who’ve won it.

Five of them won their rings with the 2015 Royals, so they’d remember well an April series in this same stadium against the A’s. Those teams did not like each other. The Royals had flipped the Wild Card game the year before in almost impossible fashion, the winner coming when Salvador Perez somehow pulled a slider, a foot outside, down the third-base line, past a diving Josh Donaldson, who only moments before had moved off the line on the advice of a coach.

The year after, in 2015, the Royals and A’s engaged in one of the most interesting and meaningful three-game series possible in April. Benches cleared every day, first on a Friday after Brett Lawrie’s takeout slide of Alcides Escobar and again the next day when Yordano Ventura hit Lawrie with a 99-mph fastball.

The Sunday rubber match included five Royals ejections, including Kelvin Herrera for throwing 100 mph toward Lawrie and pointing to his head on the way out. But the Royals won that game even with a lineup short on regulars — Lorenzo Cain tied it in the eighth with a double over the center fielder’s head, and Kendrys Morales won it with a double off the wall.

This group has not earned the comparison to 2015. That group broke through with a winning season in 2013, then a World Series run in 2014. A playoff run in 2021 would be skipping at least a step, but this group has been clear that’s exactly what’s expected.

No matter which way this season goes, it is hard not to feel like we’ll look back and remember how this team handled this specific moment of doubt. They’ve had some dark times the last few years. Nobody wants to go back there.

“We’re all feeling the same amount of frustration that we haven’t won in a stretch here,” pitcher Danny Duffy said. “The energy, it’s not a lack thereof, it’s not going our way right now. We’ll keep pushing, we’ll keep bringing it, just like we always do.

“Nobody’s putting their head down, nobody’s sulking. We know what we’ve got in that clubhouse. We know what we’re capable of. We’ve shown it already. We’re going to continue to show it when we come out of this.”

With each compounding loss, that challenge gets a little more difficult.