NEW YORK -- Despite a historically awful performance from Luis Severino, the New York Yankees advanced to the ALDS with their win over the Minnesota Twins in Tuesday night's AL Wild Card Game (NYY 8, MIN 4). The Yankees will now take on the Cleveland Indians in a best-of-five series.

Tuesday win was, of course, made possible by New York's vaunted bullpen. Severino bowed out of the game after recording one out, and after that, four relievers combined to hold the Twins to one run on five hits and three walks in the remaining 8 2/3 innings. They struck out 13. Chad Green, David Robertson and Tommy Kahnle did the heavy lifting before Aroldis Chapman handled the ninth.

The Yankees answered Minnesota's three-run top of the first with three runs in the bottom half, quickly tying the game. That rally was set up by a Brett Gardner walk and an Aaron Judge single. Didi Gregorius brought the house down with a loud three-run home run to right field.

Gregorius, in many ways, is the face of this current Yankees team. The Yankees began their youth movement in earnest this season, but the process started two years ago when they plucked the 24-year-old Gregorius from the Diamondbacks to replace Derek Jeter. He has since emerged as one of the game's top two-way shortstops and is hitting cleanup for a postseason team.

"It's so much," manager Joe Girardi said during an in-game ESPN interview when asked about Gregorius' importance to the team. "Eighty-seven RBIs, he missed a month of the season. Defensively, what he does and how he's the captain of the infield. You know, we've kind of put him in the four-slot when we had some people that got hurt and he's filled in great there, and we just left it there."

Later in the game the Yankees scored a run when 24-year-old Gary Sanchez hammered a leadoff double and 24-year-old Greg Bird drove him in with a single to right. An inning later, the 25-year-old Judge crushed his first postseason home run, a low line drive rocket into the left field seats. Severino's disaster outing aside, the kids led the way in the wild-card game.

"I think it means a lot (for the young guys to experience the postseason) because a lot of them showed up in a big way," Girardi said following the Tuesday's win. "You think about the day that Aaron Judge had, Sanchez had a big double, scored a run. You can think about Bird driving in a big run, the job that Green did tonight. Tommy Kahnle is fairly young, too. So I think it's big."

The Yankee for years relied on veteran players and free agency to supplement their homegrown core. And it worked for a very long time, because they were in contention for close to two decades. Things starting to fall apart the last few years, however, which is why the Yankees played a single postseason game -- a wild-card game shutout loss to Dallas Keuchel and the Astros in 2015 -- from 2013-16. Consider their 2015 Opening Day lineup:

One player under 30, and that was Gregorius. He was the vanguard of this youth movement, and he's gotten better in each of his three seasons in pinstripes. Now look at the lineup the Yankees used in the wild-card game on Tuesday:

LF Brett Gardner RF Aaron Judge C Gary Sanchez SS Didi Gregorius 2B Starlin Castro 1B Greg Bird CF Aaron Hicks DH Jacoby Ellsbury 3B Todd Frazier

Only three players over 30, and only one of those three -- Gardner hitting leadoff -- was in a prominent lineup spot. The other two over-30 players, Ellsbury and Frazier, hit eighth and ninth. The oldest player in the 2-7 spots in the lineup is Hicks, who turned 28 on Monday.

The transition -- that is the Yankees' word for this process of getting younger, not mine -- to a younger roster has not only led to an improved team. The Yankees are much more exciting and fun than they have been in the past. For the better part of two decades this was a very old school "act like you've been there before" franchise, and that's fine. But it can be kind of dull. Among other things, the Yankees now have a mock talk show after home runs:

Rebuilding is a two-step process, really. The first step is acquiring as much talent as possible. The second step is developing that talent into MLB players and incorporating them into your everyday lineup, rotation or bullpen. The Yankees acquired a lot of young talent during last summer's trade deadline sell-off, though the talent acquisition part really started several years ago, when they traded for Gregorius, drafted Judge and signed Sanchez and Severino out of the Dominican Republic.

The process of turning that talent into big league players? It feels like that happened overnight. The Yankees had an old and, frankly, boring roster as recently as the 2016 trade deadline. Now they have a new young core with very exciting -- and very productive -- players. It didn't happen overnight, though. It took Gregorius three years with the Yankees to get to this level. Sanchez had 2,725 plate appearances in the minors. Judge had 1,513. It takes time.

The state of the Yankees: a veteran player watching the kids do big things on the field. USATSI

The Yankees were never going to take the same route as the Astros, Phillies or Braves of completely tearing things down and rebuilding over a number of seasons. That's just not what this organization does. General manager Brian Cashman and his staff attempted to rebuild on the fly. They wanted to stay competitive while getting younger. They've not only managed to do that, they did it in a fairly short period of time. Now all that young talent has the team back in the ALDS for the first time since 2012.

"The roster has really changed a lot since (the last time we went to the postseason)," said Gardner, the longest tenured Yankee who himself had a big wild-card game. "There's obviously been a lot more turnover, a lot more young guys on the roster, a lot less veteran guys. I love the team we have now -- I miss some of those guys we had back in the day -- but I love the team we have now. I feel great about our chances. I'm excited to get to Cleveland."