If a long-suffering franchise ends the longest playoff drought in North American professional sports, but nobody is around to cheer it, does it even count?

That was the question facing the Toronto Blue Jays, who, in a fashion befitting of the city’s often-curious sports scene, clinched their first playoff berth in 22 years on Friday night without knowing.

The Jays were in after they beat the Tampa Bay Rays and the Minnesota Twins lost to Detroit. It was believed that both the Twins and the L.A. Angels needed to lose in order for the Jays to secure a berth, so when the Angels won their late-starting game on the West Coast, it seemed as if the Jays would have to wait at least another day to celebrate.

But number-crunching fans did the math overnight and found that given the remaining head-to-head games between a trio of contenders, the Jays could do no worse than the second wild-card spot. Whether they won or lost on Saturday, they were in.

But before the game Jose Bautista, the team’s longest tenured player, was still incredulous. He saw the logic, but still would not concede. “It’s like if the weatherman says there’s 100 per cent chance of rain, but it hasn’t rained yet.”

The team’s official Twitter account had it wrong, too, announcing Saturday morning that with a win they would clinch a playoff berth. “It’s surprising nobody knew,” manager John Gibbons said.

The players, certainly, were oblivious. They went about their pre-game business as usual Saturday morning. As did general manager Alex Anthopoulos, who was at his five-year-old daughter’s birthday party on Saturday morning when his phone started blowing up with congratulations. “But my understanding was Anaheim had to lose, so I didn’t believe it.”

By late morning the Jays and Major League Baseball crunched the numbers themselves and officially confirmed it before the Jays defeated the Tampa Bay Rays 10-8.

But after 22 years, what’s an extra day, right? The players made up for the short delay with a champagne-soaked and cigar-smoked, post-game clubhouse party.

With Drake’s recent “dis” track, Back 2 Back — which references the franchise’s 1992 & 1993 World Series victories — playing through the clubhouse speakers, players — some wearing Go-Pro video cameras on their heads — doused each other in beer and champagne.

“Any time you put yourself in the post-season you gotta celebrate it,” said David Price, the Jays’ transformative ace, who won a wobbly game against his former club on Saturday.

But a day before the corks were popped, the players seemed split about whether or not to celebrate at all, given that their sights remain set on winning the division, not simply earning a wild-card berth. In fact, Bautista said the players decided before Saturday’s game that they wouldn’t celebrate.

“Because even though getting to the playoffs means a lot — especially for our fan base, (which) has been waiting for so long — we want to win the division. That’s still the goal. But we just got in here and the emotion, the excitement, everything took over,” he said. “I don’t know where they were hiding the champagne, but somebody went and got it and it got a little crazy. We expect to have another one of these when we win the division. That’s our goal and we’re going to get it.”

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R.A. Dickey, who won the secret-clinching game on Friday night, said after his outing that he didn’t expect much of a party for the simple playoff berth. “I think we were just going to have a toast, but Eddie (Encarnacion) wanted to go for it. So we did.”

Gibbons, who did his post-game media session holding a small plastic glass of champagne (the players, by contrast, preferred to drink and douse by the bottle), gave a simple toast to the players and the team’s baseball operations staff, saying he was proud of them and that they should be proud of themselves. “Then everyone just kind of screamed,” Anthopoulos said.

The Jays won their 89th game of the season on Saturday, the franchise’s highest total since 1993, a year that ended, of course, with Joe Carter’s memorable World Series walk-off. It stands today as the Jays’ last post-season memory. In recent years Jays fans have watched forlornly as baseball’s other long-suffering clubs — the Baltimore Orioles, Pittsburgh Pirates and Kansas City Royals — all ended their own playoff absences in successive years.

At last, the Jays now have their chance.