CHICAGO – The visitors’ clubhouse at Wrigley Field is a dingy little room, low-ceilinged and shaped like a single-wide trailer, better suited for storage than a tangle of large men soaked in bubbly and tipsy on Miller Lite and high from the foregoing three hours of baseball. The Milwaukee Brewers, professional afterthoughts, had earned the right to defile the place with ribaldry. So defile they did.

Anyone who was dry took a sticky, boozy bath, from the soon-to-be MVP of the National League to the team owner wheeling around on a scooter with his recently repaired Achilles tendon swathed by a waterproof cover to the manager and general manager who conspired to get them here to the pitcher who spent the summer as a pariah and enters the fall ready to face his recent past.

That it was Josh Hader on the mound for the final six outs of a tense, titillating Game 163 on Monday afternoon was only fitting for the Brewers. They stood by him when his vile old tweets were exposed at the All-Star Game. He never wavered, never faltered and never looked better than he did in shutting down the Chicago Cubs for the eighth and ninth innings and sealing a 3-1 victory that gave Milwaukee the National League Central division title, the top seed this October and home-field advantage through the NL playoffs.

It capped a day that was positively Brewers. Good-enough starting pitching. Good-enough hitting. And a relief corps whose depth is matched, if not exceeded, by the quality of its stuff. As the Cubs mixed and matched their bullpen pieces, trying to find something that could keep the Brewers’ eighth-inning onslaught at bay, Milwaukee sat pretty, knowing that Hader was at the ready, just waiting to show that the Brewers’ frenzied comeback to win the division was no fluke.

“We don’t panic,” Brewers catcher Erik Kratz said. “We’re at 1-1 in the eighth inning, and we’re wearing ’em down to get to a point where we can do what we do.”

Which is to unleash the Kraken. Hader arrived with the Brewers having taken a 3-1 lead on four Cubs relievers with a leadoff single from Orlando Arcia – his career-high fourth hit of the day – a pinch-hit double by Domingo Santana, a liner up the middle from Lorenzo Cain and another run-scoring shot to center field by Ryan Braun. The 5 2/3 innings of one-hit ball that Jhoulys Chacín gave them were a gift, and the jam that Joakim Soria worked out of in the sixth was key, and the dominance from Corey Knebel in the seventh was imperative.

Because here was Hader, all arms and legs. Mostly left arm, actually. In the eighth, he threw his four fastest pitches of the season. In the ninth, he yielded a two-out single to Javier Báez on the ninth pitch of the at-bat, bringing to the plate Anthony Rizzo, whose solo home run off Chacin had accounted for the Cubs’ lone run and just one of three hits. Hader induced an easy fly out, and not only did it allow the Brewers to celebrate with the loud, proud throng of fans whose “Let’s go, Brewers!” chant after they’d taken the lead couldn’t be drowned out by worn-down Cubs supporters, it reinforced Milwaukee’s stake that for all the talk of Cubs and Dodgers, Dodgers and Cubs, it was the Brewers who were best of all over a 163-game stretch.

“He’s a special kid,” Brewers manager Craig Counsell said. “He’s got a special gift. We got him some rest, and because we got him some rest, he was up for what was ahead of him.”

The Brewers weren’t trying to write Hader’s story as some sort of redemption. They understand the reality: The tweets will chase him for years, maybe his whole career, and in the minds of many sully even his greatest moments on the field. That there’s difficulty in separating performance from action. That real redemption comes away from the mound, in mind and deed.

What he did Monday – what the Brewers have done for the last month – was undeniable. The Cubs’ bullpen – which looked so shaky that they’ll need superlative starting pitching to remain alive, even if they win Tuesday night’s wild-card game against Colorado at Wrigley – actually finished the season with a better ERA than Milwaukee’s. September was an entirely different matter. With Knebel back to his unhittable 2017 self, Jeremy Jeffress finishing out a dream season and Hader booking the final 27 of his 140 strikeouts this year, the Brewers boasted far and away the best bullpen in baseball in September.