When the Nationals beat the Cardinals 8–1 in the third game of the NLCS, an on-field reporter asked Anthony Rendon, the team’s third baseman and MVP candidate, about the recent shift in the team. “We’re winning games?” he asked, rhetorically. “I don’t know. Maybe we’re scoring more runs than the other team, but shoot, maybe we’re finally coming around.” If Rendon’s answer lacked the polish of most postgame interviews, it may have gotten closer to the banal truth of the matter. Minus Harper, Washington’s principals are largely the same as in recent seasons. Rendon dispenses doubles and homers, the pair of right-handed aces Strasburg and Max Scherzer pace the rotation, and the prodigious 20-year-old Juan Soto hits cleanup and patrols left. The manager, Davey Martinez, is also a holdover; in his first season last year, the Nationals went a disappointing 82–80. A talented team has won when it counts; it could be as simple as that.

Fans and analysts concoct theories, of course. The most popular is that Harper’s departure has been a blessing. His up-and-down production, the thinking goes, is more than made up for by a new egalitarianism. The biggest moment of the playoff run so far, an eighth-inning rally in the wild-card game to turn a one-run deficit into a one-run lead, was a collaboration: The stalwart Ryan Zimmerman muscled a bloop hit, Rendon walked to load the bases, and Soto drove in the winning runs. Washington fans have added mocking updates to their old Harper jerseys during the playoff run; the slugger’s new team, the Philadelphia Phillies, went .500 and missed the postseason. “What I believe in is it takes more than one person to win the championship,” Martinez said earlier this week, “and that’s been the message since spring training.”

Strasburg’s playoff run, too, has had a pleasingly corrective quality. The Nationals’ first-ever postseason appearance, back in 2012, featured a controversy over their benching of the then-24-year-old flamethrower, who was two years removed from Tommy John surgery. The team wanted to protect its player, along with its investment; as the Nationals lost to the Cardinals in five games, critics wondered why Washington hadn’t sat Strasburg earlier in the season. Seven years later, Strasburg has proved to be the postseason dynamo fans envisioned at the time. He entered in relief to hold the Brewers scoreless for three frames in the wild-card game and, on short rest just three days later, outdueled the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw in the second game of the division series. Strasburg has allowed only four runs over 22 postseason innings, with 33 strikeouts.

Still, the Nationals’ newfound playoff success is hard to square with its lackluster history. Where Scherzer, a two-time Cy Young winner with Washington, ran into bad luck and shoddy bullpen support in past postseasons, he now looks like his steamrolling self, firing 21 strikeouts over three appearances against the Dodgers and the Cardinals. The Nationals’ comeback win in the deciding game against L.A.—hinging on a pair of eighth-inning homers from Rendon and Soto and an extra-inning grand slam from the veteran Howie Kendrick—mirrored the ways they used to fall short. The Dodgers were, by almost any measure, the superior team, with a deeper pitching staff, a heartier lineup, and a more accomplished bullpen. It’s perhaps to the Nationals’ advantage now that they know how little such designations matter.