A best-of-three series gives you exactly one afternoon of mercy. The Phillies spent theirs when Alec Bohm put Philadelphia ahead with a two-out home run in the 10th inning and the Braves lost the chance to go home early and rest.

Two outs is the cruelest place to hit one. The Braves had the inning nearly in a jar with the lid screwed down, and Bohm opened it with a bat. Atlanta now has to win a Game 3 against a team that has just learned it can be hurt and not die.

Wild Card series are built to be short, and that design is the whole point. The format compresses a 162-game season into one long afternoon, and every extra inning of it is an inning of television nobody scheduled. A series that ends in two games leaves a hole in the broadcast calendar. Game 3 fills it, and both clubs have spent a summer earning the right to be the reason.

Meanwhile the Dodgers watch from upstairs. Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes says Shohei Ohtani is "feeling great physically," and manager Dave Roberts updated Freddie Freeman's knee before the NLDS. That is the language of a front office reading a chart and not a prayer. The less comfortable news is that Los Angeles has lost a reliever for the postseason, which matters more in October than it does in June, when a bad bullpen night is just a bad night and not a flight home.

The Braves and Phillies get a third game. The Dodgers get to sit and wait for whichever of them is left standing, and to find out whether that is a gift or a slow-acting poison.

My read: a bye is a great thing to have until the week you realise you have not played a meaningful game in a while. Bohm just handed Philadelphia the opposite condition, which is that they have been playing for their lives all week and are still alive.