ATLANTA — Where do you even start?

Of all the sports heartbreaks that the city of Atlanta has suffered in its five-plus decades as a major league town, Wednesday night’s decisive NLDS Game 5 — where the Braves surrendered 10 runs in the first inning to the Cardinals en route to a 13-1 defeat — has to rank among the most pathetic, most embarrassing, most burn-every-ATL-item-you-own that this beleaguered, beaten-down fan base has ever suffered.

Strap in, folks. This one’s going to be a ride.

Let’s start with the scoreboard, that cold, pitiless tally of futility. Ten runs. Ten runs! In the first (censored) inning! How does that even happen?

It happened the way Hemingway described how bankruptcy happens: gradually, and then suddenly. The Cardinals played a bit of small ball to start the game — get ‘em on, get ‘em over, get ‘em in — but before long, they were racing around the bases like Olympians running laps.

Mike Foltynewicz — born the day after the Worst-to-First Braves clinched the National League West way back in 1991 — lasted exactly 23 pitches, lofting up batting-practice beach balls that the Cardinals laced to every angle of the field like they were using laser pointers. They broke Folty, and they broke his replacement, Max Fried, tagging them for a combined seven hits and 11 runs over two innings.

When the smoke cleared, the Cardinals had posted the best first inning in playoff history, and had tied the mark for best postseason inning ever. Since the deluge came before the Braves even got a chance to swing a bat — Atlanta got one pity run on a Josh Donaldson homer in the fourth — you could make a convincing statistical argument that this was, for the home team, literally the worst half-inning of postseason baseball ever played.

That’s going to leave a mark that won’t go away for years.

If there’s any solace Braves fans can take, this was like getting your arm lopped off with one stroke of a sharp axe, rather than getting it gnawed off by a badger. Thank heaven for small comforts.

On a broader scale, The Most Brutal Half-Inning Beatdown In Baseball History happened because this city is flat-out cursed. It’s true. You know the numbers: one championship in more than 170 seasons across the four major sports. Two teams fled, three others flail.

Ozzie Albies and Dansby Swanson know the end is near. (Getty) More

Read this stat and tell me there’s no curse: The Falcons, as you may have heard, blew a 28-3 lead in the Super Bowl. Game 5 happened two years, eight months and three days after that Super Bowl collapse. This city doesn’t avoid Fate; oh no, Fate owns a nice piece of property and an SUV in the Atlanta suburbs, all the better to pay visits to the local teams every year.

Sure, other teams have ghosts. Blown saves, walk-off losses, heartbreaking errors. But the Braves? The Braves, my friend, have a cemetery. Those 19 postseason pennants since 1991 adorning light posts above right field? Those aren’t honors, man. Those are tombstones.

Look, kids! There’s 1991, where Lonnie Smith ran the Braves right out of a possible World Series Game 7 win! Check out 1996, where Mark Wohlers hung a slider that Jim Leyritz hit so hard that the Braves haven’t won a World Series game since! Or hey, how about 2001, where the Braves ran into the pitching firestorm of Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling … and haven’t won a postseason SERIES since! Scoot a little down the line and there’s 2010, where Brooks Conrad committed three errors in one NLDS game! And then there’s 2012, where an “infield” fly that dropped somewhere north of Alpharetta cost the Braves a chance against these same Cardinals. So many memories!

Lord. They need to sink the 2019 banner in the depths of Lake Lanier and never speak of this season ever again.

After the game, with the scent of cheap Champagne from the Cardinals’ locker room wafting down SunTrust Park’s back hallways, the Braves’ postgame clubhouse was funeral-home quiet, the only sound the pop of backslaps and hugs as players embraced one another and said their goodbyes. Tarps that would have been unrolled for a Champagne celebration — the first in 18 years — remained curled up atop the lockers.

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