TORONTO — Brian Cashman saw a national columnist speculate that now might be the time for the A’s to behave like the A’s and proactively trade Josh Donaldson at the peak of his value and before he became too expensive.

This was early last offseason and Cashman called Oakland general manager Billy Beane to check in on this, and one of Cashman’s best friends in the game assured him Donaldson was going nowhere.

Here comes the except.

Except Alex Anthopoulos just would not stop calling. He wanted Donaldson, wanted him so badly that “no” was not an acceptable answer.

“Alex is and was certainly relentless,” Oakland assistant GM David Forst said by phone. “That is his personality. But we didn’t trade Josh to make Alex go away.”

In arguably the key moment of the 2015 season — certainly when it comes to shaping the AL East — Anthopoulos’ untiring efforts were rewarded. If he called about Scott Kazmir or Jeff Samardzija or just to gab, he eventually inquired about Donaldson, dropping hints about what he might be willing to surrender to obtain the third baseman.

Eventually — in the A’s way of thinking — he made an offer that could not be refused. An offer so good that Oakland never shopped Donaldson to a single other team. Not the Yankees. Not anybody.

The A’s required a controllable third baseman with upside to replace Donaldson and got Brett Lawrie. With Addison Russell having been dealt the previous July (for Samardzija), they zeroed in on a high-end middle infielder, and got well-regarded shortstop prospect Franklin Barreto. They also received two pitchers (Kendall Graveman and Sean Nolin), whose service clock had yet to begin — and they were particularly high on Graveman going back to his amateur days.

So on Nov. 28, the Blue Jays obtained Donaldson. Cashman admits he was surprised it went down. But Forst said: “We don’t generally shop guys around. There was a list of players we liked [that Toronto included]. We knew what we wanted.”

You wonder, though, if other teams might have beaten the Toronto proposal. Instead, with Donaldson off the board — actually never on it to the rest of the industry — the Yankees signed Chase Headley for four years at $52 million, the Red Sox gave Pablo Sandoval $95 million for five years, the Giants obtained Casey McGehee, etc.

Forst said the A’s “have no regrets” about the deal, believing the group of players who did little to keep Oakland from falling into last place in 2015 still have meaningful futures. Also, Donaldson is likely to become at least a $10 million player this offseason and keep climbing in arbitration until he is a free agent after the 2018 campaign. But for 2015, at least, the Blue Jays just might have the AL MVP in Donaldson.

It is not hard to imagine how different the AL East race would look had the A’s engaged the industry on Donaldson and the Yankees ended up with him. Donaldson — who had four more years of club control at the time of the trade — would have been worth a package that even included two from Greg Bird, Aaron Judge, Jorge Mateo and Luis Severino.

Donaldson’s energetic, durable two-way genius likely would have made the Yankees the unquestioned dominant AL East team. Instead, he had 39 homers, a league-leading 120 RBIs and a .942 OPS for Toronto.

And it probably should be for Toronto. Blue Jays executives watched at Camden Yards last year as the Orioles beat Toronto and celebrated clinching the AL East on the field for about a half-hour. They watched every second of it.

That imagery only motivated a motivated-to-go-for-it organization to step harder on the gas pedal. After all, the Blue Jays have not reached the postseason since winning the 1993 World Series — the majors’ longest drought. Anthopoulos and manager John Gibbons were viewed as on thin ice, and longtime team president Paul Beeston was entering his final year on the job.

The building blocks of the turnaround came last November with the additions of Donaldson and Russell Martin, not only superb two-way players, but gamers tasked with improving the concentration and competitiveness of the club. And Anthopoulos did not stop.

There were good small additions such as Devon Travis, Justin Smoak and Chris Colabello, and then two July blockbusters for Troy Tulowitzki and David Price, plus helpful pieces such as Ben Revere, LaTroy Hawkins and Mark Lowe. Cliff Pennington was added in August, and when Tulowitzki was injured, the Blue Jays acquired defensive stalwart Darwin Barney while, comparatively, the Yankees stuck with what they had when Mark Teixeira was lost for the year.

As was demonstrated with Donaldson, Toronto has been far more willing to surrender big prospects than the Yankees as the frustration of being absent from the playoffs for this long has stirred greater action than all the historical pushes associated with the Yankees.

In 2015, that had helped Toronto create a superior roster to the Yankees and a 3½-game lead after winning the opener of a three-game series at Rogers Centre. It is a strange juxtaposition — the Jays not just trading for Donaldson, and ultimately Tulowitzki and Price, but also trading places with the familiar big-game-hunting Yankees.