CLEVELAND – The Toronto Blue Jays team that takes the field against the Cleveland Indians in the American League Championship Series on Friday is different than last year’s club in more than just personnel. Two weeks ago, they stood on a precipice with their season in the balance. A terrible start to September cost them a chance to repeat as AL East champions. A start-and-stop recovery nearly knocked them from the wild-card, too.

“We knew we had worked so hard put ourselves in the position to make the post-season,” says centre-fielder Kevin Pillar. “And we saw that slipping away.”

In the end it didn’t, barely, and now the Blue Jays are deep into October, four wins away from the franchise’s first World Series appearance since 1993, believing they are better for the experience. They ride a six-game winning streak into Game 1 of the ALCS, when Marco Estrada starts against Corey Kluber, having already dispatched the Baltimore Orioles in the wild-card game before sweeping away the Texas Rangers in the division series.

They’re hitting again. Their starters are rolling. Their relief pitching is doing enough. And having already faced the end, they feel stronger than they were at any point last year.

“Without a doubt,” says shortstop Troy Tulowitzki. “It seems like when our back is up against the wall, that’s when you see the best version of the Blue Jays. I feel like I come to the locker-room and tell myself, ‘Man, today is an important day,’ and sure enough, by the time I leave the field, we win that game.

“We’ve been through a lot this year as far as adversity. We didn’t win the division, we never went on a huge run, we kind of were steady all the way through but more than years in the past on good teams I’ve been on, there was a lot more, ‘I don’t know if this team has it.’ We kind of fed off that, grew as a group, really pulled it together and really answered some questions.”

Is this year’s team tougher than the 2015 squad?

“I think just from what we’ve went through, we’ve had to be,” says reigning AL MVP Josh Donaldson. “Look, we’ve had [Jose] Bautista gone for a lot of the year, Tulo had a little stint on the DL, we had several guys get banged up, Devon [Travis] has been in and out, it’s forced other guys who normally aren’t in the lineup as much to have to come in and understand that we need them to be successful, and for the most part we’ve done that.”

Cleveland, similar in some ways to the Kansas City Royals team that knocked the Blue Jays from the ALCS in six games last year, is the next test.

***

On Sept. 1, the Blue Jays had just taken two of three from the Orioles in Baltimore and led the AL East by two games, seeming destined for a first-round clash with the AL Central champions. Then, suddenly, shockingly, the bottom nearly fell out of their year. They dropped six of their next seven games, held a players-only meeting, lost five of their next nine and fell into survival mode.

Pillar points to the steely calm of catcher Russell Martin as being pivotal. Martin didn’t have the best September at the plate, slashing .148/.300/.309, but he hit four homers with 13 RBI, one of them a two-run shot in a 10-2 win at Seattle on Sept. 20 that helped steady the Blue Jays. He also caught 178 innings over the month.

“When the ship gets rocky, he’s our rock, he’s the guy who tells us, ‘I’ve been here, I’ve done that, just the ride the wave, we’re going to be all right,’” says Pillar. “And he drops little comments like, ‘I refuse to not be in the post-season,’ and when he says that you believe him because he’s refused to not be in the post-season the past [six] years.”

Still, the Blue Jays weren’t themselves at the plate, scoring just 100 runs in the month – an average of 3.70 per game – while slashing .238/.335/.363. They struck out once every four at-bats, with 221 Ks in 884 ABs and stranded 210 runners, nearly eight per game.

And so many of their players were beat up physically.

Donaldson jammed a hip against the Boston Red Sox on Sept. 11 and missed three games, nearly unheard of for him. Bautista, Martin, Tulowitzki and Michael Saunders were all dealing with varying degrees of leg issues. And the lack of offence placed heavy demands on their high-leverage relievers, a situation exacerbated when Joaquin Benoit suffered a torn calf during a brawl with the New York Yankees on Sept. 26.

The season could very easily have spun out of control. It nearly did.

“Obviously we had that closed-door meeting led by Tulo, called by our leaders on this team. We knew we weren’t playing our best baseball,” says Pillar. “Everyone that was in that locker-room last year, young or old, has taken on some sort of leadership role this year, we all know how special it was to get to the post-season, we know how important it is to all of us to get back there.”

After consecutive trying losses Sept. 17-18 to the lowly Angels, Tulowitzki said the Blue Jays were at a point where they really needed to dig deep and stick together. They did.

“The losing was important for us,” Tulowitzki says now. “It was a gut check, it made us play some games where if we lose we were going home, and now we feel like even though it’s a seven-game series, there’s a lot of room for mistakes, where we were playing games there where there was no room. So this team has been through a lot and that can only help you.”

***

In Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals, a flu-stricken Michael Jordan scored 38 points to lead the Chicago Bulls past the Utah Jazz 90-88, taking a 3-2 lead in the series. Bulls coach Phil Jackson praised the performance as “a heroic effort.” Donaldson cites that when discussing his approach to playing through injury.

“When you’re banged up or feeling ill, what athletes tend to do is having to focus sharper and every step. Everything that you do has to have a meaning to it,” he says. “You have to be [more efficient].”

That’s what he learned to do during a month spent getting extra treatment on his hip before and after games. Though his three homers and seven RBI were lacking compared to his normal standards, he still found ways to contribute, collecting 22 walks and scoring 16 runs while playing strong defence.

“It all goes back to you have to know yourself as a player and what you’re capable of on any given day,” says Donaldson. “For me, I try to help my team win and it’s not necessarily going up there and focusing on hitting a three-run homer. Maybe it’s working a walk. Maybe it’s making a play defensively. Or maybe it’s just hitting a single whenever the time calls for it. At the same time, when I go up there whether I’m feeling good, bad, or indifferent, I still have confidence in myself and my teammates that I’m going to be able to help them win.

“People want to talk about September, I had 22 walks in September. It wasn’t necessarily that I was feeling bad, because there were a lot of games I was walking away 0-for-3 and I hit two or three balls on the screws. You can’t control that. Same with this series, I can’t necessarily control where that ball is going, all I can control is my mindset and my focus and being able to help my team win in different ways.”

As an offence, the Blue Jays felt snakebit at times, hitting the ball hard with little to show for it. That’s when frustrations mounted, right as the stakes continued to increase, and the promise of time for things to correct inherent to the 162-game grind began to fade.

“It just made us a tougher team, mentally,” says Donaldson. “You look at our September schedule, we had [15] games against the AL East in a row and the AL East is tough, everybody knows that. That stretch that we went on, we knew going into it we were going to have our hands full. We were able to not only just survive in getting into the playoffs, but we were able to play pretty good baseball.

“There were some times the other team played better than us, but at the end of the day, it gave us more confidence going into the playoffs, saying, ‘Hey, we went through this tough stretch.’ Then we had to play Baltimore in the wild-card game, really good team, we were able to come out ahead in that, then we played Texas, and we had a strong showing against the best team in the American League.”

***

Three wins in four games against the New York Yankees Sept. 23-26 looked to have solidified the Blue Jays’ spot in the post-season. Then they dropped two of three to the Orioles, one on a blown-save in the ninth inning by Roberto Osuna, to put themselves back in peril. It wasn’t until wins on the final two days of the season – a 4-3 win over the Red Sox on Oct. 1 and a 2-1 win Oct. 2 – that their fate was secured.

In the eyes of general manager Ross Atkins, that’s where things definitively turned.

“Not only did they want home-field [advantage against Cleveland in the first round], I think they probably wanted to eliminate us,” he says. “That series, winning those games, Aaron Sanchez’s start in the last game of the season, seemed massive to me. At the same time you try not to put too much weight into any game, into any one inning, into any one single performance, but I think that will be a series we look back and think about the perseverance and the toughness if we’re able to finish this off and win a championship. That would be the series I look back to.”

Why would the Red Sox be so motivated to eliminate the Blue Jays, given that the AL East was already clinched?

“I just would imagine that any chance you have to eliminate any potential contender, you would look to do that in the event that it would come back to bite you at the upside of resting a player, or not pushing a reliever, whatever it may be,” says Atkins. “It was apparent that Boston was coming with their best after us. I don’t know their strategy, intent and motivation, but if I were on the flip side, I would have been doing the same thing.”

That series did come back to bite the Red Sox, as they opened the division series in Cleveland, dropped the first two games and were swept out of the post-season.

In contrast, the Blue Jays used their final two games as a springboard, beating the Orioles 5-2 in the wild card before sweeping away Texas in an emotional division series.

“Being in a position where we have a lot to lose after playing very good baseball and being in first place [after] the first five months and then having a terrible start to September shook us up a little bit,” says Bautista. “We finished the month strong, and obviously playing in the wild-card game and then that first series with Texas, we kept that type of level of focus and intensity that we had to close out the regular season. Hopefully we can continue to do that.”

***

Martin is in his sixth straight post-season appearance, and ninth in 11 years. Despite the bumpy road he insists he never lost faith.

“Knowing our team and knowing what we have on our team is enough for me to believe that we can make it,” he says. “With how we were playing, we went through our rough stretches and everything, the talent we have and the competitors that we have, it’s never been as fun and as easy to go and compete with guys.

“I don’t feel like I have to get anybody up, or try to push anybody, everybody is already ready to play. Even when times are tough, you never really see any panic, you never see guys get down too much. It’s just a really fun team to be a part of.”

Last year, a 43-18 finish to the regular season allowed the Blue Jays to cruise to an AL East crown before they rallied from a 2-0 deficit to beat the Rangers in the division series. Then they lost in six games to the Royals in the ALCS, unable to come back from another 2-0 hole.

The 2016 Blue Jays are “just a little more seasoned,” says Martin. “A lot of guys had their first taste of post-season baseball last year and now that they’ve been through it, not that it takes the lustre away, but it takes away the unnecessary anxiousness that doesn’t need to be there. I feel like that’s a good thing.”

Another good thing can be facing obstacles and overcoming them, as the Blue Jays did in September. In sports, as in life, the easier path isn’t always best.

“You look at some of those teams that are never faced with adversity and usually those teams don’t play as well,” says Tulowitzki. “Those teams that come in hot and throughout the season have to deal with injuries, losing streaks, those teams are a little bit tougher, tougher to beat. That’s the perfect example of us.

“Last year, at the end we were playing in meaningless games, we already wrapped up the division, we know where we’re going. This year, we didn’t even know if we were going to make it. It’s definitely a tale of two different seasons. Last year we know how it played out, we’ll see how this one plays out.”