The U.S. Open lost a big part of its identity.

And it has nothing to do with par.

For years, the USGA has boasted — and rightly so — that it was the most democratic of all majors. Half of the 156-man field had to go through some form of qualifying just to get a tee time.

Max Homa won at Quail Hollow last year in a Sunday that featured Rory McIlroy and Justin Rose. A month later, he had to go through 36-hole qualifying for a spot at Pebble Beach and didn’t make it. The year before, Adam Scott narrowly qualified for the U.S. Open, five years and two months after he won the Masters.

Major champions. Amateurs. PGA Tour winners. Teenagers. Only the score mattered.

The USGA really had no choice but to cancel qualifying this year for the U.S. Open and the other three championships it will try to run while operating amid a pandemic.

The numbers didn’t allow for it. For the better part of a decade, at least 9,000 players signed up for the U.S. Open. A majority of them would have had to go through 18 holes of local qualifying at 108 golf courses in 45 states and Canada. What followed was 36 holes of sectional qualifying at nine courses in the U.S., one each in Canada, Japan and England.

John Bodenhamer, who’s in charge of USGA championships, called qualifying the “cornerstone.”

But in losing the identity of being “open,” at least the U.S. Open won’t gain an asterisk.

Assuming the 120th edition can be played this year — it already has been postponed from June to Sept. 17-20 at Winged Foot in New York — the field will be stronger than ever. The winner will have passed golf’s most thorough examination, unofficially known as the “toughest test in golf.”

Even so, the greatest loss is hope.

Never mind that only four U.S. Open champions have had to go through qualifying over the last 50 years, the most recent being Lucas Glover in 2009.