DUNEDIN, Fla. — Jose Bautista did not seem eager to talk about the Blue Jays’ win over the Rangers in Game 5 of the 2015 ALDS, or at least not to me. That game, and especially its wild seventh inning, stands as perhaps the most memorable one of the entire 2015 campaign.

You probably remember it: The Blue Jays, who had battled back to tie the series after losing its first two games at home, fell behind the Rangers when baserunner Rougned Odor scored because catcher Russell Martin accidentally banked a return throw off Shin-Soo Choo’s bat, prompting a long delay while umpires figured out the call and frustrated Blue Jays fans threw their beers onto the field. Then, in the bottom half of the same inning, the Rangers’ solid infield endured a defensive meltdown that allowed Bautista to deliver the game’s deciding blow, a triumphant, three-run homer he punctuated with an emphatic bat flip.

“It was a great moment,” he said Wednesday. “It’s over with. Time for a new season. That’s exactly how I feel.

“What I say doesn’t matter, because you’re going to do with it what you want, so I don’t want to waste my time elaborating. It doesn’t matter. If I would say it, I would say it in my own direct line to fans, so I know it’s not going to get misconstrued…. I’ve got a couple more followers, I believe, than you and maybe all the media in here combined, so I’ve got a bigger reach. More people are going to listen to what I say on my direct line anyway.”

Fair enough. Bautista owes me nothing, and does, in fact, have way more Twitter followers than I do (though you’re welcome to help close that gap). So I’ll take that all as his blessing to say what I want about that inning and that moment:

Holy crap. Even four months later, that game still registers as one of the weirdest, wildest, and most exciting I’ve ever seen — at any level, anywhere — in nearly three decades’ worth of following baseball. And I strongly believe Bautista’s bat flip was completely and irrefutably awesome, an understandable display of emotion in an extremely emotional baseball game, and a rare and endearing reminder of the way players get at least as invested in games as the passionate fans watching them at home. Nothing Jose Bautista said or didn’t say Wednesday morning is going to change that stance.

But wait: Who cares what I think? I watched that game from the comfort of my living room, in between trips to cover different postseason series. And it happened four months ago. All I really want to say about it now is whatever the Blue Jays players involved have to say about it after some time to reflect, since their experience with that inning is way more interesting to me than my own, and presumably also way more interesting to you.

So I’ll turn it over to Aaron Sanchez, the reliever on the mound for the bizarre play involving Choo, and, ultimately, the game’s winning pitcher. Here’s what Sanchez said when asked about that inning:

At the time, I didn’t know what the call was going to be. I didn’t know if the run was going to score or not. I ended up giving up the run, and all the commotion was going on, and in my head, I’m like, ‘Look, I’ve got 3-4-5 coming up, I’ve got to get this guy out and give our team a chance to get back in the dugout and swing the bat. So my entire focus, that whole — whatever, 38-minute span of arguing and understanding what the hell was going on, really — I’m trying to stay as locked in as I possibly could, because once you get into a situation like that, where now the crowd gets into it, things can start snowballing so fast if you don’t have a grasp on it. The umpires kept coming up to me, like, ‘Hey, do you have to throw?’ And it kind of got to the point where I’m like, ‘Stay away, stop bugging me — I need to stay locked in.’ Obviously I didn’t say that, but every time I saw them coming close, I just kind of stepped away and stayed in my zone. I was fortunate enough to punch out Choo to end that inning. Obviously, tensions are at the ultimate high because I’m furious about the fact that, if I get tagged with an “L” on something that happened the way it did, I would have been devastated. And then for Bautista to come up the next half inning and do what he did, I mean, I think at that point in Toronto sports, you go from the all-time low, and never betting on teams there ever again, to the absolute ultimate high: Bautista hitting that three-run bomb and winning Game 5 after the whole series shook out. We don’t lose at home (in the regular season), they come in and beat us twice. We go down there with our backs against the wall, it’s a must-win situation every game, and we win three in a row. The whole DS was just insane. I was in the dugout (for Bautista’s homer). After all that stuff happened, coaches are like, ‘hey, you’re going back out for the eighth.’ And again, I’m trying to stay locked in. Stuff’s going on, and I’m kind of zoning out a little bit. I hear the perfect sound, and I look up — I don’t even see the ball, I run to the top step, put my hands up, and just look, try to find the ball. I blacked out. For real. I think everybody did. You couldn’t believe your eyes at that point. What a lot of people don’t understand (about the bat flip) is, (Yoenis) Cespedes did the same thing two weeks before and it didn’t get as much buzz at that. You get caught up in emotion. He was not trying to disrespect anybody. This team hasn’t been to the playoffs in 20-something years, and he hits the biggest home run of his life? In my eyes, he didn’t do anything wrong. He lived in that moment. It was probably one of the biggest hits he’s ever had in his career. And that just shows you what type of player he is. It was just… probably the time of my life to date, for sure.

And what does Russell Martin have to say about all this? Martin, after all, was nearly the game’s goat for the ill-fated return throw. Conspiracy theorists even suggested Choo stuck his bat in the way on purpose, making a rube out of the typically excellent catcher. Has anything like that ever happened to him before?

First time. First time in my life. I’ve seen somebody throw a ball to third base and the hitter not get away and it ricochet off the hitter, but I’ve never really — actually, that’s not true. I have seen it; I think Shane Victorino got one in the helmet. I’ve seen that one. But that’s the only other time. And it wasn’t in the postseason or anything like that. There’s no chance (he did it on purpose). And it’s not like I was mad at him or anything, I felt like, it was just one of those things, an accident. It’s not something you think about, because it’s never happened to you before. I’m not thinking like, ‘Oh, I’m going to get close to throwing the ball back and it’s going to ricochet off the knob of the bat or whatever.’ I was almost in disbelief. And I wasn’t sure exactly what the ruling was, so I was just waiting to see what the call was before anything. And then when the run counted, I was like, ‘You have got to be kidding me. There’s no way we can lose like this.’ I’m looking ten years down the road, like, ‘Top 10 Blunders,’ and I’m thinking, ‘No way.’ And then Jose plays hero. First, it was completely uncharacteristic — (Rangers shortstop Elvis) Andrus making errors like that, that’ll probably never happen again in his whole career. It was like the two extremes: One extreme is, you have something that happens, I don’t know, once every ten years — if that, right? — and then you have a sure-handed shortstop that makes a couple of routine mistakes, and then the big blow. And it wasn’t just that, there was the fly ball when (Josh) Donaldson got jammed and the second baseman backpedaled and kind of misjudged the ball. Routine play after routine play and it was like, ‘What’s going on? There’s something going on out there, and I don’t know what it is!’ It was definitely crazy…. I don’t think (the bat flip) was done out of spite. In that moment, it’s like — he’s outside himself, you know? The energy, and how it all unfolded with the crowd, them throwing beer cans, you could feel the tension in the air. And that was the explosion, the complete 180 of just going from disbelief — I can’t believe this just happened! — to, we’re on top now. I’ve never gotten that pumped, ever, in any sport. Unbelievable. I wish I had better words to describe how I felt, man.

That’s not necessary: “Unbelievable” sums it up perfectly.

Bautista’s correct that it’s time for a new season, and it certainly behooves pro athletes to focus on the tasks ahead of them more than the ones in their past. And he faced a whole lot of needlessly sanctimonious nonsense over the bat flip, so it makes sense he might be reluctant to talk about it now.

But none of that takes anything away from that moment, and no one who saw it will forget it anytime soon even if the Blue Jays fell to the Royals in the ALCS. It happened, and it’s over with, and it ruled.