You could look at this game in one of two ways.

Option A, which many of us probably reflexively took immediately after strike 3, is that this is an unbelievably frustrating loss in which the Braves coughed up a two-run lead in late innings and squandered a chance to win the series.

Option B is it was Cristopher Sanchez against Tyler Mahle and if you had a gun to your head and someone asked you the most likely run margin between the two teams, you probably would have wound up figuring on something like the headline result.

We knew these two teams would be well-matched coming into this series – we just went 4-3 across seven games against these exact same guys just a few weeks ago, and other than the one 12-2 blowout, the other six games were very close. We’re both teams whose offenses are filled with underperforming veterans on expensive contracts and whose starting rotations are banged up. We have a better bullpen and arguably more roster depth, but these guys have killed us before and I won’t rest easy until the stake is through their hearts and the daylight has turned their bodies to ash.

First off: Tyler Mahle was absolutely brilliant this afternoon. The Phillies hit a number of balls hard in the first inning but he managed to limit the damage to one run – with some assistance by Brandon Marsh, who badly expanded the zone on his splitter. The rest of the Philly lineup proceeded to flail miserably at his splitter the rest of the afternoon. (Per Savant, nearly 60 percent of his pitches were splitters.) Across the remaining six innings, he scattered three hits, all singles.

The guy has been such a stud for us. It wouldn’t feel right to write a game story without spending the majority of it in awe and gratitude for just how incredible he’s been – as midyear pickups go, he’s writing a legacy to rival the Crime Dog.

As Mahle departed the game, we were knotted 1-1, and he’d matched zeroes with one of the two or three best pitchers in baseball not named Chris Sale.

The late innings were where all the excitement happened, as is so often the case with this team. In the regular season, our boys hit .240/.301/.393 through the first seven frames, and .272/.340/.467 thereafter. It has made for quite a few joyful moments like we experienced yesterday, but it also ain’t exactly making it easy on yourself.

Anyway, in the bottom of the 7th inning, Bryce Harper utterly lost a ball in the shadows and it fell for an RBI “double”; the following inning, Walt Weiss called on Dylan Lee to get out Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper, and they hit back-to-back solo shots to tie the game up, then Alec Bohm hit a wall-scraper for the go-ahead run in the top of the tenth.

It sucks to lose a game you were winning late, but it’s just hard for me to feel as apoplectic as I would have felt if it felt like we in any way deserved the lead – it sure seemed to me like the baseball Gods just gaveth and tooketh.

Back at it tomorrow, as Johnny Wholestaff lines up for what seems less likely to be a pitcher’s duel, although Zack Wheeler is likely making himself hoarse as we speak demanding to get the ball on short rest in an elimination game.

Let’s send these bums home.