Having been swept by the Rockies, let’s suppose that the Giants are done — that they not only have nearly no chance of winning the National League West, but that the last two months of mediocre play and bad luck, and the fact that three teams in their own division probably have more talent than they do, will make it impossible for them to win the wild card as well. Even if one doesn’t grant this premise, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that it’s so, and that the collapse has come. This leaves a simple question: Is it necessarily a bad thing?

The winter after the 2006 season should have been when the Giants made hard decisions, but they didn’t, instead persevering with their strategy of signing veteran “presence” to surround Barry Bonds. But this year and next year were also always going to be a time of transition for the Giants, even in the best of circumstances. After this season, Bonds, Omar Vizquel, Armando Benitez and Pedro Feliz are all free agents. Next year will be nearly as busy: After the 2008 campaign, the Giants will be done with their commitments to Ray Durham, Matt Morris and Rich Aurilia.

For the Giants, the complex of decisions and opportunities presented by the expiration of so many contracts is more important than the question of whether or not they make the playoffs this year. After all, they are a relatively rich team, and they have young pitching talent; falling short this season is not going to doom them to irrelevance. It would, though, allow them the chance not taken last year — to make decisions based on the long-term interests of the team. Even better, it would allow them to think about what those long-term interests are.

I’m beating a dead horse at this point by stating that much of the blame for this year’s poor showing rests on the fact that the team is just old. Neither Durham nor Aurilia are slugging .400. Leadoff “hitter” Dave Roberts, currently on the DL, has a .283 on-base-percentage. Pedro Feliz gets on base at a .292 clip, which more than negates his .438 slugging. There are a lot of benefits to having All-Star players in their 30s, but older players are vulnerable to injury and abrupt decline, and when you count on a lot of older players, you’re susceptible to this sort of thing.

The 2005-06 Giants paid the bill for a long run of winning with veteran talent that had to be signed to contracts that took them well past their primes. Brian Sabean’s mistake for 2007 was trying to milk a couple more years from the same strategy. That doesn’t mean they were wrong to do so — we all enjoyed the winning — just that there are consequences for bringing in a brigade of well-seasoned talent every year to prop up a run at a pennant. The Giants under Sabean have never written a season off to establish a young player at a position and thus avoid having to make questionable long-term commitments, and since they haven’t had the kind of farm system that the Braves had during their run of division championships, it was inevitable that their reliance on oldsters would eventually catch up with them.

Yet another season when they miss the playoffs, then, might not be such a bad thing if the team takes advantage of the opportunity it provides to really assess what they want to do and how they want to do it. Do they want continue to take on bad contracts and commit to playing expensive veterans at the end of their usefulness? They were pressed into that in the past by circumstance, but now is the time to master circumstance. As well as he fields, and as classy as he is, for instance, Omar Vizquel is a 40-year-old shortstop. Would signing him even for a year really be the best idea for the future, or would it be better to sign a stopgap while looking for (or developing) a long-term solution? Do the Giants really want to lock themselves into paying a 42-year-old Barry Bonds a salary of something over $15 million just to watch him get his three thousandth hit next season?

There is another way to build a perpetual winner, though, one that values flexibility, one that tolerates the risks associated with young players in the knowledge that those risks come with their own rewards, and one that exhibits an awareness that there are worse things than having a losing season while executing such a plan. If this year’s disappointment inspires the Giants to embrace such an approach, Giant fans in 2012 just might look back at this year with a special fondness. Losing is bad, after all, but not learning anything from losing is worse.