CHICAGO — Cubs manager Joe Maddon held a team meeting, and the person who perhaps would win a vote for most optimistic person in sports focused on crisis.

Of course, this being Maddon, he wrapped crisis in positivity.

“I told the boys something was going to go wrong,” Maddon told The Post. “When that happens, we have to remember our composure more than ever. It is going to happen, so don’t be surprised by it. Expect it to happen. These are the moments, like all season, to hold your composure, realize it is just a bad moment and move on to the next moment.”

This was Maddon recognizing — charmed season or not — there is almost no chance the Cubs could win 11 postseason games and their first title since there were still only 46 US states without encountering peril. So he saw no reason to avoid the topic and act like there would be no talk of Billy Goats, Bartman and Bumgarner along the way.

“The message was: We have handled our business well all year, let’s keep doing what we have been doing,” Maddon said.

Maddon actually disdains team meetings, thinks they are window dressing, a way to suggest a manager is doing something at a down time. Maddon believes creating confidence, energy, joy, looseness and bonding needs to be part of the culture reinforced daily by him, his coaches and his players in normal interactions.

He says he has just three team meetings a year — to open spring training, to open the second half and to open the playoffs, if his team is fortunate enough to be there. And we have known his team was going to be in the playoffs since roughly the first umpire scream of “Play ball!” this season.

Which is why the theme of handling crisis this postseason was his central message even before knowing the Giants would beat the Mets in the wild-card game and be the Cubs’ opponent Friday night in Division Series Game 1. The Cubs have been the story of this season since the last one ended.

They won 97 games in 2015 after splashes for Maddon and Jon Lester, then increased the talent pool, payroll and sense of loathing around the game with free-agent splurges on Jason Heyward, John Lackey and Ben Zobrist before the 2016 season.

High-profile members of the team were the cover boys for all baseball previews. Every major national media outlet circled through Sloan Park in Mesa, Ariz., to ask Cubs personnel about being the team to beat despite not winning it all since 1908.

Maddon, being Maddon, came up with the team motto: “Embrace the Target.” T-shirts were made. It made no sense to him to run away from what the world would not allow them to run away from. So Maddon just incorporated it within less batting practice, back-field petting zoos, pajama-wearing road trips and relief pitchers in left field.

The quest is to lower the temperature around his roster, forge a forum of fun. That combination and, of course, talent — including the acquisition of Aroldis Chapman from the Yankees in July — helped the Cubs dominate the season, leading wire-to-wire and winning their most games (103) since 1910, or the year the “Tinker to Evers to Chance” poem was written about the Chicago infield.

You will notice the sprinkle of history within all of this because how do you avoid it? The Cubs have not even been to the World Series since 1945, and the dread since — black cats and a ball rolling through Leon Durham’s legs and Moises Alou slamming his glove — defines a franchise at nearly 11 decades of title-less misery.

That hovers above the franchise always. Now combine it with being the targets of 2016 and you can see the level of potential stress at the most fickle time of the baseball calendar. A champion must survive three rounds of potential bad bounces and misplaced curveballs and unexpected heroics from the other side (do you think the Mets thought the big hit that would eliminate them would come from Conor Gillaspie?).

The 114-win 1998 Yankees are on the short list of greatest teams ever, and there they were in Cleveland during the ALCS, down two games to one. The 108-win 1986 Mets faced Waterloo against both the Astros and the Red Sox before somehow getting their parade.

Crisis is unavoidable at this time of year, so Maddon decided not to avoid it. He told his favored Cubs — his championship-or-bust Cubs — the road to a title is not lined with rose petals, to expect thorns.

“I want to keep a simple message, if anything, I want to subtract layers, so let’s just deal with it,” Maddon said.

The Cubs have done that brilliantly all year. But it is now a new season for them. Can they finally change their old story?