Let’s go back to that ninth inning against the Yankees the other day. Yes, this is likely a difficult time for the Toronto Blue Jays, and possibly for you, I know. The weekend series against the Red Sox is looming over everything, and your stomach may be in knots thinking about it, and maybe the entire season is hanging in the balance, who knows. But let’s go back for a minute.

So it’s 7-4 New York, and the Jays have lost four of six games, and Jose Bautista draws a two-strike leadoff walk against nine-foot-tall, 455-pound Yankees closer Dellin Betances. Not bad. And then Josh Donaldson walks, and as he’s trying to crucify Edwin Encarnacion, Betances unleashes a pitch that advances both runners and, hey, something’s cooking. No outs.

And Encarnacion spends the next eight pitches fighting off either nasty 88-mile-per-hour curveballs or high-90s fastballs, and finally he smacks one up the middle, and it’s 7-5. Hmm. If this team can’t rustle up enough money to sign Edwin Encarnacion, you think, they really don’t deserve the love they’re getting.

Two batters later Melvin Upton Jr. beats out his dribbler to first base because Betances steps on an imaginary bag four inches to the left of the real one. 7-6. Bases loaded. One out. Betances is done. The spring is winding, and the tying run is 90 feet away. Big game. If you were watching this it probably felt a little like being on a tightrope, with a fall underneath.

And then Kevin Pillar strikes out and Justin Smoak is the last chance, and suddenly he lifts that ball into the night, and Brett Gardner doesn’t have time to think and as he catches it he hits the wall and the ball splashes up around the top of his glove, but doesn’t come out. Holy cats, what a catch. Gardner jumps in the air, flips the ball into the night. He had apparently just been talking to Yankees left-fielder Aaron Judge about how intense it all felt.

Yeah. It was exhausting. But it was fun, right? What a great baseball game that was.

This is what you asked for. Not a ball that was a foot short of a grand slam; not losing six of eight games to fall out of first place for the first time in a month; not slumps or injuries or the damned Yankees trotting out good young players all of a damned sudden.

But this is what you wanted, for all those years. Last season the idea of meaningful September games was theoretically in play, but it wasn’t the real thing. That Jays team wasn’t living and dying with every pitch, if only because they played baseball at such a laugh-out-loud level so much of the time. Remember? They’d just start mashing the ball like it was a Sunday morning softball league game, and the pitching was stellar and the defence was nails.

Sure, Alex Anthopoulos would worry, because he saw every game as something that might go wrong. The since departed general manager would look at the schedule and think, what if we lose two of three here, slump there, wind up back in the hot soup of the wild-card chase.

Instead, last year’s Jays were a rolling baseball wildfire that just laid waste to everything. By the time September rolled around they had won 24 of their last 30 — which was right around the time that they hired Mark Shapiro to rebuild it all, actually — and it was just absurd. They were always going to make the playoffs, so the stress was saved for Texas and Rougned Odor and the seventh inning in Game 5 and those pesky, nerveless Kansas City Royals.

But the real tension didn’t happen before that. Last season, the real slow clockwork torture — the baseball specialty, all the moving and stationary pieces, the pitch-by-pitch Rube Goldberg machine that can explode from suspense to action at any time — didn’t really start until the post-season kicked in. It had its moments. Whichever Royals fan yelled at Ryan Goins that one night deserves season tickets, probably.

This, though, this is what you asked for. When you asked for meaningful baseball in September, you asked for the worry, for the torture, for the sinking feeling. The big difference between last year’s Jays and this year’s Jays is this year, instead of being a travelling circus, they are merely a very good team. They’re in a slump right now, which happens. Their offence has gone quiet, which happens.

But Marcus Stroman is coming around, and Josh Donaldson will hit again, and it probably won’t be this bad the whole way home. Even if it is, though, this is what was missing all those years, when the air in the Rogers Centre would stop moving in late July and you’d get 12,000 people on a Tuesday to watch the Minnesota Twins. The Jays will probably pull out of the dive, but even if they don’t, there’s no guarantee you get this again next year, or the year after that. Sit there, on the edge of your seat, and let the Rube Goldberg terror wash over you. Meaningful baseball means it means something if you lose, too, and if the Jays live and die in a pennant race, it’ll be disappointing. But it’ll still beat watching everyone else do it, instead.

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