Shortstop Danny Espinosa, left, looks away as starter Stephen Strasburg waits for the Nationals trainer to reach the mound during Wednesday night’s game. Strasburg left the game in the top of the third inning. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)

For 17 hours 19 minutes, Stephen Strasburg and everyone who is part of the Washington Nationals franchise — as well as its countless fans — held their collective breath. From the moment Strasburg walked off the Nationals Park mound Wednesday night with a stricken look and his glove over his mouth, both the pitcher and the organization were trapped in torturous baseball limbo. Hour after hour they waited for what have become some of the most frightening words in sports: “the results of the MRI exam.”

Was Strasburg facing a second Tommy John surgery for replacement of an elbow ligament — a procedure from which only about 25 percent of pitchers fully recover? Or was this baseball panic about pain but not true baseball peril?

“We found out the MRI results at 2:16 p.m. [Thursday]. The news is as good as it could be,” one relieved member of the Lerner family said, checking his phone for the exact wording of the text that said Strasburg had a “strained flexor mass” in his right forearm, not the dreaded torn ulnar collateral ligament. “Who knew my life would come down to ligaments?”

[For Washington sports fans, Stephen Strasburg injury is too-familiar feeling ]

More important, Strasburg’s pitching life is not in question. Certainly, he could rush back too fast and create a new injury, including — given the location of the flexor mass — another Tommy John scenario. But that’s always the case when pitchers have strains or pains. How fast should you or can you come back? The huge question, especially for a star pitcher who is 15-4 and signed a seven-year, $175 million contract extension in May, has been answered. He could, if he or the Nats chose, simply shut down activity for the 2016 season and soon be 100 percent healthy. He would be locked and loaded for 2017, 2018 and 2019 and perhaps through 2023 if he didn’t exercise his options. That’s a ton of “future” that the Nats saw going toward the waterfall as they awaited word Thursday.

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Of course, the Nats, who led the NL East by 8 ½ games entering play Thursday, will have to decide how fast — or even whether — Strasburg should come back. They will wait for swelling to go down and Strasburg to be pain free. “The next four or five days” will be important, according to trainer Paul Lessard, in getting an initial sense of how quickly Strasburg is recovering. Until then, nobody knows anything. You can’t have any “time frame” when the injury isn’t even a day old yet.

But you can have an enormous sense of relief that one of the most thrilling — but often star-crossed — pitchers of his generation is not in any serious career danger. The predictable fan reaction is: Can Strasburg be back in the rotation in time for the NL Division Series? Or could he be ready in six weeks for a possible showdown with the Cubs with the World Series on the line. Pitch Game 3 and maybe Game 7, then get carried off the . . .

With all due respect to the many fans who just can’t help dreaming about postseason triumphs, please get a grip. From Strasburg’s first day with the team, the Nationals have done everything to maximize his total career accomplishments. They have viewed him as a pitcher who deserves a fair chance, by following best medical practices, to live out his athletic destiny; he’s not just a commodity. That deserves respect.

[Here we go again: People quick to blame Strasburg’s setback on Dusty Baker]

On the other hand, Strasburg’s a pro. He’s paid — a lot — to produce. Pros wrestle constantly with those deceitful concepts — “pain” vs. “injury.” A pro eats the pain for the pay and for his teammates. But if he plays injured and, almost inevitably, gets hurt worse, it kills everybody. That’s always a difficult balance, one the the Nats and Strasburg must search for yet again.

Reliever Sean Burnett has had double-digit MRI exams. “The wait is awful,” he said. “It’s a nightmare, your career in the balance.” Burnett has undergone four potentially career-ending surgeries — all performed by James Andrews — from age 21 to 32: two Tommy Johns, a torn labrum and a torn flexor tendon.

Pitching coach Mike Maddux, left, and manager Dusty Baker, right, escort Stephen Strasburg to the dugout Wendesday night. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)

After the third major surgery, he made it back to the majors for “three games before I could feel it tear again,” said Burnett, who underwent TJ No. 2 and was told his chances to recover were 20 percent. Maybe. “That’s all I needed — 20 percent. Tell me I can’t do it, and I’ll prove you wrong,” he said.

When he got called up from the minors last week, he got a text from Andrews. “It said, ‘You’re a medical miracle,’ ” Burnett said. Later, Burnett chatted with reliever Shawn Kelley, who had TJ surgeries in 2003 and 2010. “If we win the World Series, we’re going to have our picture taken together,” Kelley said. “. . . But it doesn’t look like ‘Sean’ is a real good name for a big league pitcher.”

Both were optimistic about Strasburg. “TJ guys know that there are always things in there [in the elbow] trying to compensate for other things that are not quite 100 percent. Something will ‘lock up,’ ” Kelley said. “A lot of weird things flare up and scare the [bleep] out of you. But they turn out to be nothing much.” So they wished that for Strasburg.

And their wishes, as well as those of who knows how many others, came true.

“The ligament is good,” Lessard said — four words that, in baseball, don’t need further explanation.

[Strasburg exits early, into a future of swirling uncertainty ]

From the day baseball fans discovered the existence of Strasburg, they wondered how wonderful he could be if he could stay healthy. Then we found out. Over a span of 33 starts — from June 23, 2015, when Strasburg came off the DL, through Aug. 1, 2016, when his record reached 15-1 — Strasburg had That Year, albeit a year of more than 365 days because Strasburg twice went on the disabled list.

In that span, Strasburg was 23-3 with a 2.30 ERA. In 215⅔ innings, he had 271 strikeouts and 50 walks. His WHIP was .090. He fanned 11.3 men per nine innings. The Nats went 29-4 in his starts.

For 17 hours 19 minutes, it seemed possible that That Year might never be duplicated. At 28, he might hear post-MRI words such as “20 percent” or “30 percent” that have sent shudders through so many.

Instead, he heard: no tear. Let’s see how you feel in four or five days.

That long, deep exhalation you hear is Washington’s huge sigh of relief. But as every National knows, it doesn’t always end this way. Manager Dusty Baker called the balance between happy and sad endings “about 50-50.”

Feel free to mutter a brief baseball “thanks.”