SAN FRANCISCO -- Joe Maddon warned his troops this moment was coming. Never hid from it. Never ignored it. Never sugarcoated it.

"I said that 'something bad is going to happen -- and [when it does] we have to stay in the moment and maintain our composure,'" the manager of the best team in baseball was saying Tuesday night, as the Toques et Clochers Cremant de Limoux gushed around him like a waterfall. "That was the exact message: Something bad is going to happen. It always does."

This was before this National League Division Series ever started. But by the top of the ninth inning Tuesday at AT&T Park, the Chicago Cubs knew That Moment their manager had warned them about had officially arrived.

They were three runs down to the San Francisco Giants with three outs to go. Which meant they were three outs away from a game they didn't want to play. Three outs away from knowing they were going to have to take the field Thursday at Wrigley Field, having to beat Johnny Cueto in front of 42,000 people who couldn't guarantee they could get through the night without thinking thoughts like "Bartman" or "goat."

In the visitors dugout along the first-base line, the men in uniform were doing their best to follow the boss' advice, to embrace this moment and keep their composure. But if you think that mindset was unanimous, well, ho-ho-ho-ho-ho.

Nearby that dugout, in the box seats, Theo Epstein had to admit he already let his mind wander. Had already let his imagination race ahead -- to Thursday, to a nervous win-or-else Game 5 at Wrigley, and all that went with it.

"Obviously, it was in the back of everyone's mind," the Cubs' normally ultra-cool president said. "You've got Cueto -- and [Madison] Bumgarner behind him. And, I mean, I trust us to win that game. But there's no margin for error."

So that's what they were staring at -- a crisis point unlike any the 2016 Cubs had faced at any juncture since the day they showed up in Arizona in February to begin this magic carpet ride. When the season began, they burst out of the gates like Usain Bolt. They started 8-1, 17-5 and 25-6. They spent one day all season out of first place. They held a nine-game lead in the NL Central by May 4.

The Cubs were ready for the kind of test they faced in Game 4, and delivered a comeback the likes of which no one has seen since 1986. AP Photo/Ben Margot

Never, on any day of their beautiful journey, had they faced this: a game they had to win. A time when they had to prove who they were and what they were. A test -- the sort of test that every great team faces -- when Something Bad Happens and then you find out if you're as great as you think you are.

Well, we now know exactly how the 2016 Cubs coped with that first test. We now know all about the miraculous and historic four-run ninth-inning rally that turned a seemingly certain Game 4 defeat into the shock and joy and celebration that went with Cubs 6, Giants 5.

We now know that this team has found the will to do something that only one other team in history -- the 1986 Mets -- had ever done: charge back from three runs behind in the ninth inning to clinch a postseason series.

But here is what you might not know: The Cubs needed to do this. They needed to make this statement. They needed to find out something important about themselves when this moment arrived.

And because they did, the 2016 Cubs will arrive at their second straight National League Championship Series in a whole different state than the team that got swept by the Mets in last year's NLCS.

"I think every team that wins in the postseason, you have to have a comeback win," said Cubs infielder Ben Zobrist, a guy who spent last October hanging out with that Royals team that won the World Series. "I think it's important. I know that eight out of our 11 wins in Kansas City last [postseason] were comeback wins. So to me, that's such a huge part of a championship team -- is that you don't quit and you always believe you're going to come back."

True, the Cubs had done this many times during the regular season, winning eight games they'd trailed entering the ninth inning -- tied for the most in baseball. And just as true, if all Giants games had just gotten rained out after eight innings this year, they probably would have won the NL West -- considering that they lost nine times when leading after eight, the most in baseball.

But what happens between April and September often feels as irrelevant to success in October as the score of the first spring training intrasquad game. And the Cubs had spent the past two nights in San Francisco learning all about that.

They'd let a three-run lead melt away in an October classic Monday night. They'd found out all about the championship mindset that had driven the Giants to win 10 consecutive elimination games. And then the Cubs went out Tuesday and got dominated for eight innings, scraping together just two hits, while whiffing 10 times, against Maddon's old friend Matt Moore.

In those box seats, Epstein squirmed nervously, not so much because of the grim numbers on the scoreboard but because this wasn't the team he'd watched play all season. And how could he be sure -- how could anybody be sure -- that that team was ever going to show up?

"We didn't play Cubs baseball for eight innings," Epstein said. "We weren't ourselves. We weren't having great at-bats. We weren't all that heads-up. We weren't us. And I think that frustration contributed to the eruption in the ninth, because all the good stuff happened at once. So obviously, hitting before the ninth inning is clearly overrated."

Right. Obviously. Before Kris Bryant dug in to lead off the ninth inning, teams in the Cubs' position -- three runs down in the eighth inning or later -- had gone an attractive 3-824 in postseason history. And it had been 30 years since any team had found itself in that big a mess and come back to win. So that was pretty uplifting.

But now you can forget all that. Now these guys can always remember the ferocious at-bats they ground out, the tough walk Anthony Rizzo drew off left-on-left machine Javy Lopez, the huge hits they got from Bryant and Zobrist, from Willson Contreras and Javier Baez, all amid a parade of five Giants relievers. Four runs in the ninth in this setting? How did that happen?

There had never been a series-clinching rally quite like it. And now it will live on in Cubs lore forever -- as long as this October turns out the way they keep dreaming it will.

"I'll be honest: I can't remember what happened yesterday," said 39-year-old catcher David Ross, on a night when he became the oldest catcher ever to homer in a postseason game. "But I'll never forget this."

And maybe no one will. Of course, we have no idea where the rest of this month will lead this team. We have no idea if this juggernaut really is going to prove that it has that undefinable quality that will make it different from the 107 Cubs teams that came before it.

But file this away: Something happened in San Francisco, on a beautiful Tuesday evening, that appeared to leave its mark on these men.

"I've been thinking about the adversity of the group for a while now," Ross said. "Even over the last month of the season, I've thought about having the ability to overcome adversity in big moments. And they don't get any bigger than that. There's no more adversity than being on the road, on the West Coast, playing a team that's won three championships in the last five years. And losing like we did last night ... then coming back today, it just says a lot.

"This," Ross said, "was a special, special night."

Because of this night, there are now just two rounds of glory standing between these Cubs and a place among the legends of baseball. Yeah, they were in this same position a year ago, too. But somehow, this feels different.

Last October, they arrived in the NLCS a year ahead of schedule, just living the dream and playing it all out to see how high they could climb. Now they return to this same place after a totally different journey. Now there are no doubts about how talented they are and how good they can be.

So now, they're expected to win. And once again, they'll have to take their manager's word for it that expectations are just part of the process.

"I'm telling you, man, that's a good word," Maddon said Tuesday night. "'Expectations' is a good word. Because normally it means that you have something good attached to it at the other side. Pressure. Expectations. I want our guys to thrive on those two words for the years to come, I want the organization to. In the end, that means there's a lot of expected of you. Good. There should be."

The journey begins anew Saturday at Wrigley, with the first NLCS to open in Chicago since the 2003 team unraveled on the doorstep of history. Now it's a new group's turn. And once again, it can be sure that something bad will happen. But something magical also can happen. And this edition of the Cubs seems remarkably cool with all of that.

"Now," Zobrist said, "we've put ourselves in position to do something special."