On Baron Browning’s first snap of the 2023 season, he showed in two ways why his return meant so much to the Broncos.

First, the schematics. He debuted on a third-and-7, Green Bay’s third play of the afternoon. The down and distance gave Vance Joseph his first chance to break out Denver’s newest rush package. It featured three outside linebackers — Browning, Nik Bonitto and Jonathon Cooper — inside linebackers Drew Sanders and Alex Singleton, and defensive end Zach Allen as the lone down lineman with five defensive backs behind.

“It is fun, man. We’re getting a little more comfortable doing it. It was our first time in it,” Cooper told The Post this week. “We’re having fun with it and trying to get better at it in practice. I think it’s going to be really exciting.”

Then, the skill. Browning exploded up the field on the snap and into Packers left tackle Rasheed Walker. He powered Walker backward until Walker simply grabbed Browning around the waist and didn’t let go. No penalty flag came, but the rest of the group did their job. Bonitto drew a double team off the right side and arced around both, leaving Allen to beat a one-on-one matchup with the right guard and hit Love as he threw short of the first down marker underneath.

Punt.

One play. A new package with the Broncos’ most athletic pass-rushers. A new beginning, finally, for Browning, who had knee surgery in May and had been working toward this moment since.

The Broncos think Browning is an immediate impact player, both in the way he can lift Denver’s front seven and in the way he strikes opposing players.

He’s just happy to be back and adamant that his 29 snaps against the Packers were nothing more than a knock-the-rust-off first step. His coaches and teammates are even more bullish.

They expect the Broncos and foes alike to feel his presence immediately. The weight of his hands, the fluidity of his hips and the violence in his rushes, they say, are not just those of a contributor on the edge, but of an organizational staple this year and beyond.

“We’ve been waiting for him this whole entire time, this whole season, and it was really exciting to be out there playing with him again,” Cooper said. “We’re just really happy to have him back.”

“Oh, that looks different”

When Michael Wilhoite arrived in Denver back in the winter, he set about learning his new position group.

Denver’s edge rushers, mostly young outside of Randy Gregory, had potential but not a ton of production. Bonitto struggled as a rookie. Cooper was a role player until injuries and a trade whittled the group down. Browning caught his eye immediately.

“When I first got the job and I’m first watching film and evaluating, I saw it,” the first-year Denver outside linebackers coach told The Post.

But Browning had a big setback coming. A knee injury he initially sustained during the 2022 season gave him no issues during the first part of his offseason training. In May, it barked. Next thing he knew, he was having meniscus surgery and being told he had a 4-6 month rehab ahead of him. He’d miss the early part of the season. Maybe the first half.

Frustrating for Browning, of course. For Wilhoite, too, but life moves on in the NFL.

“I’m focused on who’s in the room and who’s healthy and who’s playing right now,” Wilhoite said. “So you kind of lose sight of it. But as soon as he walked back on the field, it’s like, ‘Oh yeah. Oh. Yeah. I remember now.’”

Browning provided a reminder to all in his first outing. Pro Football Focus credited him with four hurries and a 25% pass-rush win rate. He logged four tackles and jumped offside twice for good measure.

“I didn’t really have any expectations,” he said. “I was just trying to, really, get back into the flow of the game. I still am. I really only practiced two weeks. … It’s not so much the speed of the game, more it’s just about what I’m looking at. My eyes and my progressions and my pre-snap indicators that I key into before each snap.

“I felt a little bit more comfortable toward the end of the game, but still I’m kind of getting comfortable.”

Wilhoite saw plenty to be encouraged by.

“I knew it was there,” he said. “I just didn’t know the extent of the explosiveness and powerfulness until you see it in person. Until you’re watching it and you see it right away in that game.

“The first couple plays, you’re like, ‘oh, that looks different.’”

“A natural leader”

Browning didn’t relish the idea of spending all of training camp on the side field at Centura Health Training Facility.

He worked his way through strengthening to putting full weight on the surgically repaired knee. He started moving more, then running in a straight line.

While Gregory and Frank Clark conspicuously played into the fourth quarter of preseason games, Browning kept making progress behind the scenes.

By the time Week 1 arrived, he was working pass-rush moves against a tackling dummy 50 yards from where his position group did individual drills.

He returned to practice for the first time the same day Denver informed Gregory of its intent to either trade or release him.

He participated in a walk-through ahead of a Week 6 matchup with Kansas City the same day that Clark, signed in June in part as a response to Browning’s injury, dropped out “sick” as he and the team worked out a revised contract to facilitate his release.

Those veterans may be gone, but in Browning the Broncos edge group has their actual leader back in action. He took that mantle from Bradley Chubb a year ago at the trade deadline more than from Gregory or Clark.

“We’ve asked him, I feel like, in the room to step up as a leader and just talk to us and guide us,” said Cooper, the oldest player in the room at 25. “He’s been doing that for the last couple of years, I feel like, since he’s been here.

“He’s just a natural leader.”

Wilhoite coached inside linebackers for the Los Angeles Chargers the past two years and played that position himself. He knows all about playing in the middle of the field.

In Browning, who the Broncos selected in the third round of the 2021 draft as an inside linebacker, Wilhoite sees a player with the mentality to run a defense but the kind of body and skillset that can strike fear into tackles on the edge.

“One thing about second-level guys is they’re good communicators because they’re used to running the show as the general,” he said. “They’re used to being leaders, they’re used to running the huddle. And so you get that with Baron on the edge. … He can do things that most guys don’t do. That’s dropping into space, communicating different things among the whole defense. And then he’s got that explosive get-off that you don’t get out of guys who are in the middle.

“You get the best of both worlds with him.”

Youth movement

The Broncos’ quartet of outside linebackers is made up of a trio of 2021 draft picks — Browning and Ronnie Perkins (New England) in the third round and Cooper in the sixth — and a 2022 second-rounder in Bonitto, plus undrafted rookie Thomas Incoom.

Wilhoite, 36, enjoys the challenge but with Clark gone he doesn’t have a veteran to use as a model.

So he picks a player from around the league each week and makes cut-ups for his pupils.

This week: Green Bay’s Rashan Gary.

“He’s got a good stance, he gets off, good pad level, he’s great with his speed to power and he’s good with his hands,” Wilhoite said, winding up to the actual reason he picked Gary. “But, the main thing I was showing them today when we were watching it with our guys was, ‘Fellas, he’s running off the ball. He’s not hesitating, he’s not looking around. He’s running off the ball and then once he gets to the point of contact, now he decides what I’m going to do from there.’”

Much of what Denver’s defense does from here, in 2023 but also beyond, will depend on how this group develops. When they hit adversity, what are they going to do? When they get stonewalled by a tackle, how will they respond? When a team wants to run the ball right at them, can they bow up and stop it?

“That’s the exciting part is we’re all young, we’re all striving to get better every single day,” Cooper said. “We all feed off of each other. We make each other better. It’s an exciting room and I can’t wait to see what we do with it.”

The early returns are promising. Bonitto leads the way production wise at 5.5 sacks and nine tackles for loss. He doesn’t have a sack in either of Denver’s past two games, but rotating Browning in on the other side might take some of the pressure off the former Oklahoma standout. Cooper has four sacks, three tackles for loss and teamed up with Bonitto for a critical fumble return for a touchdown against Chicago last month. Perkins hadn’t played in the NFL until the Broncos plucked him from the Patriots’ practice squad. Now the 6-foot-3, 250-pounder has played 50 snaps over the past two weeks.

“The good thing about the youth is it’s all good people and they all want to learn and they all want to work and they’re all looking for the extra work,” Wilhoite said. “That’s the beauty of the room and that’s why they’ll all be successful in this league.”

More than the promising early returns on his own performance, this is what Browning said he enjoyed most about being back on the field.

He watched the rest of his group struggle and fight and fail and succeed on the field together for six games. He watched the club that drafted him get off to a horrendous start, not only in going 1-5 but in giving up 70 points to Miami and 234 rushing yards to the New York Jets and 32 points in 2½ quarters to Washington. He watched a defense that dominated the first half of last year become the worst in the NFL over the start of this fall.

It’s not that he’s going to change that by returning to the field. Patrick Mahomes and company on Sunday will present plenty of challenges and likely create plenty of big plays with him back, just like they did Week 6 when he was out.

But he’s part of the solution, now and in the next iteration of the Broncos’ roster, whatever that looks like.

His return, he said, “felt good, especially since I had been on the sideline the past couple of weeks and in training camp watching them. So it just felt good to be out there with my position group.”

There’s a long way to go personally for Denver’s outside linebackers, the defense and the organization as a whole.

But Baron Browning’s back, and that’s a step in the right direction on all fronts.

“He’s built for it,” Wilhoite said. “Mentally and physically.”

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