CHICAGO – Introspection and baseball converge with the ease of two like-poled magnets. The sport, with its 162 games, its menagerie of minutiae, its necessity for on-the-fly change, actively discourages deep thought. Which made the scene after the National League wild-card game Tuesday night that much more incongruous. Their season over, their dream of another championship dead, the Chicago Cubs didn’t lament the Colorado Rockies’ 2-1 victory in 13 innings so much as they tried to answer a question familiar to anyone who has engaged in self-reflection: Who, exactly, are we?

There were no clear answers, not yet, which made the question that much more perplexing. Because the Cubs, two years removed from their first World Series victory in more than a century, a year separated from another NL Championship Series appearance, find themselves in baseball purgatory, believing everything’s going to be all right without knowing. Their manager is going to be a lame duck, and their farm system seems unlikely to provide a jolt of major league-ready talent, and their core – the same core that teemed with dynastic aspirations in 2016 – had just exited the 2018 postseason in spectacular fashion.

In a little more than 24 hours, the Cubs went from playing for home-field advantage throughout the NL playoffs to packing up for the winter. It was a dizzying turn characterized by a showing of offensive impotence that bled from September into October. It was a fitting microcosm of the season, actually: handed opportunity after opportunity, the Cubs simply couldn’t muster the finishing kick that defined them two years ago when they secured their oversized gold-and-diamond rings in extra innings.

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This was different. This was the Cubs shut out for seven innings by a pitcher making his first postseason start, on three days’ rest no less, before scratching across a run. This was inning after inning, every at-bat an opportunity to walk-off the Rockies and walk into a vengeance series with the Milwaukee Brewers, who had filched the NL Central crown a night earlier. This was a zero in the ninth, then 10th, then 11th, then 12th, all the way into the 13th, making it the longest win-or-go-home playoff game in baseball history. This was Tony Wolters, the Rockies’ third catcher of the game, driving in the winning run against Kyle Hendricks, the third starting pitcher the Cubs used in all their desperation. This was, more than anything, a reminder that while it’s impractical to glean too much from one game (or two or three or 10 or even 20), it would be likewise irresponsible to ignore how that game dovetailed with so many other similar ones – just two runs and nine hits in 22 innings over two days.

“Sometimes you need to get your [expletive] knocked in the dirt in order to appreciate where you’re at,” said Jon Lester, the Cubs’ starter who struck out nine Rockies in six superlative innings. “You know what? Maybe we needed that. Maybe we needed to get knocked down a peg or two to realize nothing’s going to be given to us.”

Lester is one of the Cubs’ spiritual leaders, a no-nonsense 34-year-old who admitted that his efforts to contextualize Tuesday night may have sounded overly positive. In Chicago, on sports-talk radio and Twitter and the other echo chambers of conflagrant hot-takery, the sky had been falling for months. Then it actually crashed Tuesday, and the Cubs were left piecing together the fallout. How team president Theo Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer would respond, and whether manager Joe Maddon would manage the final year of his contract without a new deal, and why a season with so much promise went sour with such rapidity.

“It’s going to make everybody mad,” Lester said. “Make Theo mad, all these guys mad. There’s a huge free agent crop coming this year. But I don’t know if we need anybody. We need to get people healthy. We need to be right. We need to be the Cubs.”

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