Bryce Harper, Rhys Hoskins and the 2022 Phillies have made themselves immortal

It happened fast. So fast. The way great things often do. The way great ones often do them.

One moment, it was cold and gray and wet and the spaces between the roars were getting longer and more distinct as the anxious murmur of impending defeat settled over Citizens Bank Park. The Phillies were six outs away from another cross-country flight, six outs away from another 24 hours of the worst sort of waiting, six outs away from this National League Championship Series heading back to San Diego at three-games-to-two, six outs away from a party indefinitely postponed.

And then it happened. Bryce Harper stepped to the plate.

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He knew it. They knew it. All 45,000. That’s how it works with the great ones. You expect it. You sense it. You know it. For nine playoff wins, two weeks worth of games, Harper had been playing some of the most brilliant baseball the month of October has ever seen. And now, here it was, the moment that could relegate all the others to nothing.

One win away from the World Series, two runs away from claiming that win, a man on first and nobody out in the bottom of the eighth.

They knew it the moment it happened. Maybe before. They saw that beautiful left-handed swing uncoiling through the zone. They saw the flash of the barrel as it cut a frictionless pass toward a sinker that clocked 98 on the gun. They saw the ball jump into the red-gray dusk.

“Folklore s—,” was how Jayson Werth later put it.

The Phillies are going to the World Series for the first time in 13 years, and they are going there in a fashion that defies any and all words, Harper’s two-run home run in the bottom of the eighth inning propelling them to a 4-3 victory over the Padres in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series. As the final out soared toward Nick Castellanos in right field and the dugouts emptied and the adoptive anthem began to play, all you could do was wonder whether any of them truly understood what they’d just done.

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Guys like Werth know. They were the last ones to do it, and they’ve spent the last decade-plus enjoying their lifelong citizenship in a city that just wants to win. The former Phillies right fielder is one of several members of the 2008 and 2009 World Series teams that have been on hand for these five home playoff wins. Like the four games before it, Game 5 began with a video tribute to one of those players and then a ceremonial first pitch. As the left field scoreboard flashed the replays of the two home runs he hit in the Phillies 2009 NLCS clincher, Werth stood on the first base line chatting with Harper, his teammate with the Nationals at the bookends of their careers. They shared an agent, and a clubhouse, and plenty of conversations about the city that had adopted Werth and that Harper would later himself adopt.

“He said this place was electric,” Harper said, “and there was nothing like winning in Philadelphia.”

He will not understand the extent of that truth until some future juncture. That’s how it always goes, isn’t it? Permanence is a quality that requires time to appreciate. The moments accelerate into a blur until they carry you far enough away that you look back and realize how fleeting most everything was. When the Phillies take the field in Houston on Friday night for Game 1 of the World Series, they will be playing for a reward far more precious than a trophy. They will be playing to have done something that lasts.

Truth be told, they have already done it. Whatever happens from this point forward, whether it ends in victory or defeat, in Houston or right here in Philadelphia, the 2022 Phillies have cemented themselves as one of those teams, as a collection of those guys. They have secured the eighth World Series berth in franchise history. They have given themselves a chance at winning its third title. They have carved themselves a place outside of time.

They did it as they should have done it. They did it as it was meant to be done: with another brilliant pitching performance by a player who had waited an entire career to pitch on this stage; with a game-winning home run by a transcendent superstar who would have happily traded his MVP trophies for this kind of chance; with all of it set in motion by a player who’d shouldered more of mediocrity’s weight than any member of the clubhouse.

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If the eighth inning was Harper’s moment, the afterparty belonged to Rhys Hoskins. He arrived in 2014, a fifth-round draft pick by an organization that was still coming to grips with the rebuilding process that lay ahead. In the years ahead, Hoskins would become the figurehead of that process, and he would pour all of himself into the role. He would become one of the best-hitting first basemen in the majors, a visible presence in the community, the guy who stood at his locker as the organization’s representative after each loss. And there were a lot of losses. So many that Hoskins soon became synonymous with them.

In a city that regards winning as a personal quality, there are few lots less envious than that of the best player on a bad team. Worse still is to be the best player on a team that consistently falls short of expectations. Correlation may not equal causation, but it sure can look that way when a team’s best is not good enough.

This is particularly true in a sport where even the Hall of Famers fail more than half the time. For a player who is as imperfect as Hoskins, and who is imperfect in the way that Hoskins is, it could sometimes feel as if some sick karmic deity had dispatched him to Philadelphia with the singular charge of bearing a fan base’s frustration. The cold streaks at the plate, the stumbles in the field, the steadfast adherence to modern-day hitting’s true-outcomes approach, all of it made him a uniquely awkward fit for a city whose patience was close to zero at the time he arrived.

The combination could have been suffocating. Yet there he was in the third inning on Sunday afternoon, swinging 3-0 with a man on second, blasting a Yu Darvish cutter into the left-center seats to give the Phillies a 2-0 lead. It was Hoskins’ fifth home run of the postseason, fourth-most in franchise history, one behind Chase Utley and Lenny Dykstra, two behind Werth.

“It’s a long time coming for sure,” Hoskins said. “Yeah, I’ve done a lot of losing here. There’s been a lot of heartbreak late in the season. I keep saying this word, but it’s just the belief that we have in each other, the belief that we have in everybody within the organization that gets us ready to go play the game.

“I think when you can rally around each other like that, believe in each other, pour confidence into each other, those type of moments, you kind of go at as a group, and that takes some of the pressure off of the individual. When that happens, the town comes out, and we had a lot of success with that.”

They will keep coming out. That much we know. The Phillies will enter the World Series as heavy underdogs. There will be all kinds of reasons to think that Sunday was the high point, that the party that raged at Citizens Bank Park will have to carry them through to their next opportunity. The pitching depth. The defense. The opponent.

Yet we have been saying the same things for two weeks now, plus several prior. A lot of those things are things we were saying back in 2008, before guys like Werth and Shane Victorino and Pat Burrell and Ryan Howard became who they are now. That’s the thing about winning — until that first time, you are always someone who has never done it.

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“That’s the toughest game to win,” Werth said on Sunday night as he stood in a hallway in the bowels of Citizens Bank Park. “Once you win and you’re in, now all the pressure’s off. What we did, those runs that we had, were pretty special given where we were in ‘07 and ‘08 and how we came back. Those don’t happen a lot. You look back at the [Matt] Stairs homer in L.A. — it’s tough to get to the World Series. It really is. It’s not easy. This is a special time in Philadelphia sports history, and what Bryce did tonight?”

Folklore s—.

Right now, they have that on their side. Some teams just have a knack. Whatever the paper trail says, whatever the numbers suggest should happen, it cannot simulate the crucible of the moment. After J.T. Realmuto hit a leadoff single to bring Harper to the plate in the eighth inning with the Phillies trailing 3-2, Dave Dombrowski turned to his son Landon as they sat next to each other in an executive club box.

“This is where legends are made,” the Phillies president said.

That’s what these Phillies have turned themselves into. From here, the legend can only grow.