For eight innings it looked like the kind of night that quietly slips away. The bats were cold, the bullpen was leaking traffic, and the crowd had started drifting toward the exits.

Then the tenth happened. A leadoff walk, a stolen base nobody expected, and a two-out double down the line that split the gap and cleared the bases. Just like that, a game that felt lost became a statement.

"We've been in a lot of these," the manager said afterward. "The difference this year is we believe we're going to win them." On the evidence of tonight, it's getting harder to argue.