As recently as two weeks ago, the San Francisco Giants and their fans seemed to be blind and delirious at the same time. Now it’s time for everyone to settle down and refocus.

As the Arizona Diamondbacks charged out of the starting gate, they looked like a wire-to-wire winner in the National League West. Meanwhile the Giants, coming off a spring training that reeked like New York in the throes of a three-week garbage strike, got off to a slightly better-than-expected start.

It was perfect for these Giants, really. Nothing to make you think their long-put-off commitment to rebuilding should be reconsidered, and just enough in terms of potential, excitement and enthusiasm to keep everyone interested while the foundation was being put down.

But then the D-Backs went into a funk. And thanks in large part to much-improved play by the veterans left over from the Paleozoic – I mean, Bonds – era, the Giants started to overachieve.

Suddenly, as July dawned, the Giants were within striking distance of the Snakes. “To hell with the record,” orange-and-blackers started saying.

Sure, the team’s 11 games under .500, but everyone else in the division is under .500, too. We can win this thing! Let’s trade a pitcher – we’ve got plenty of those, right? – and go get a bat!

The real fans, the fans who want the Giants to enjoy the kind of sustained success they so envy when they look at the A’s across the San Francisco Bay, rightly scoffed.

We can’t win this thing, you dummies, and pitching is all we have right now. Let’s keep it all, ditch the fossils and take our lumps with the youngsters so we know exactly what we need heading into the winter.

The real fans were right, and they were proven irrefutably so by the Giants’ painful limp job into the All-Star break. The final road trip, in particular, made it crystal clear that the future is not now. The future remains the future, and that should be the focus for the entirety of the second half.

That means the time is now for General Manager Brian Sabean to put on his best used-car salesman hat and find a way to dump Rich Aurilia, Ray Durham, Omar Vizquel and Randy Winn. He won’t be able to deal the albatross that is Dave Roberts’ ridiculous contract, but he can tell manager Bruce Bochy to nail Roberts to the bench when he comes off the disabled list.

Sabean also can – and has to – tell Bochy to play Fred Lewis, Emmanuel Burris, John Bowker, Eugenio Velez and Nate “Nothing to prove in Fresno” Schierholtz every day in the second half. Anything less will be career suicide.