Alex Smith’s return would be incredible. It could also force Washington into a tough decision.

For a Washington Football Team that emerged from an especially tumultuous July, an August with Smith’s return must seem like a gift. What could be more inspiring to a group of football players trying to navigate the oddest of training camps than watching the quarterback who was never supposed to walk normally again running down the hill behind the practice facility, almost a part of the team once more?

Still, an invisible wall remains between Smith and his teammates. For now he is on the physically unable to perform list, exiled to a side field where he and other players recovering from injury work each day with the team’s trainers. But only a few yards of grass separate the players on the PUP list from the actual team, and after the images of the past months emerged — the wheelchair, the scaffolding-covered cast, the photos of his leg gutted by a surgeon’s scalpel and the patched-together skin — those few yards look like inches.

And yet what happens later this summer if Smith can actually step across that divide and walk into a fight to take back the starting quarterback job? What becomes of Dwayne Haskins, the player drafted in the first round of last year’s draft to be Smith’s replacement? Rivera has said he wants Haskins to face significant competition this summer, but the battle between Haskins and Kyle Allen has always seemed to be something of a formality, with the likelihood that Haskins would ultimately win.

A competition between Haskins and Smith, no matter how limited Smith might appear, would be something different. The way Smith treats every practice like the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, the way he earns the respect of a locker room, the way he refused to let his career end when every sensible assumption was that it was over — all of it would seem to make him a strong candidate to win back the starting job.

It’s a scenario that could complicate things for Haskins, who has by all accounts worked hard to earn the new coaching staff’s trust by losing weight and sharpening his skills on his own during the pandemic shutdown. Does a heroic return by Smith disrupt the development of a player who could become the team’s franchise quarterback? Does a few weeks or months or even a year or two of a 36-year-old Smith on a fragile leg help or hurt the plan Rivera appears to imagine for his young team, one that grows together to contend for the NFC East title by the end of 2021?

While the question is hypothetical for now, Rivera opened the possibility Tuesday when he said he could “envision” Smith making the walk from the training field to the actual practice grass, adding that Smith “will be part of the conversation [at starting quarterback] most definitely,” if cleared to practice.

Should that moment come, it could force the first truly difficult football decision of Rivera’s time in Washington. Does he risk Smith’s health and Haskins’s future growth? Will picking the proven veteran push the franchise forward or leave it stuck in uncertainty? He will have to tiptoe between the will of a broken franchise quarterback who defied all expectations to come back and the hopes of a potential franchise quarterback who has yet to prove the team should be his.

“Alex Smith playing would be the best thing that ever happens to Haskins,” said one longtime NFL general manager, who asked to not be identified so he could speak candidly about Washington’s situation. His suggestion is that a competition with Smith would toughen Haskins.

Two former personnel executives said they thought Smith would be a great mentor to Haskins, the way he was to Patrick Mahomes in Smith’s final season in Kansas City.

But Mahomes was a rookie then, the team had a long-tenured head coach in Andy Reid, and Smith still seemed certain to have a big future somewhere else. In this case, Haskins will be starting his second year, and Smith will be fighting to prove he belongs again on a team with a new coach who is trying to build for a bigger beyond.

For now, Washington’s quarterback clash is Haskins vs. Allen. And yet with each sprint Smith runs or every cut he makes on the training field, he draws closer to their battle. Should he manage to cross the line onto the practice field, things could change in ways no one could have imagined.

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