The Phillies say they are mentally tough. They have a chance to prove it after an epic Game 2 meltdown.

There is no sound like a loss that nobody saw coming. It envelops a post-game clubhouse, the silence hanging in the air like an infinitely-held breath. The players trudge to the showers, the coaches trudge to the bus. Even the clubhouse attendants look trapped in their hundred-yard stares. It is the absence of sound, really. White noise’s anti-matter.

The vibes change fast this time of year. Momentum is a night-to-night thing, an inning-to-inning thing, a batter-to-batter thing. Those were the increments in which everything unraveled for the Phillies in Game 2 of the National League Division Series. For 5⅔ innings, they were a team with an express ticket to the penultimate round of the playoffs. Barely an hour later, they had only their regrets.

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“It’s gonna sting tonight, obviously,” catcher J.T. Realmuto said after the Braves scored five unanswered runs to beat the Phillies 5-4 and even this best-of-five series at one game apiece. “Especially being up 4-0, going back 2-0 would have been great, but we’ll take the split and get back to Philly and regroup [Tuesday], have the off day, and get back after it at home.”

For the first time all postseason, you have to wonder if they have it in them. This wasn’t just a loss. It was a commercial-grade refrigerator falling from the sky and landing five yards behind you. Did that really just happen? Apparently, it did.

It began innocently, deteriorated gradually, and ended loudly. Now, for the first time all postseason, you actually have reason to wonder. Momentum can be a double-edge sword. The more of it you have, the worse it hurts when you lose it. The Phillies are way too resilient a team to definitively label this a crushing loss. But it sure has the potential to be.

Welcome to the moment, then. Part of being a champion is picking yourself back up. Rare is the postseason run where a team isn’t forced to do it at least once.

Truth be told, the Braves’ dramatic come-from-behind victory felt like an imminent possibility long before Austin Riley’s long, arcing go-ahead home run landed like a psychological grenade in the middle of the visiting bullpen. That’s crazy to say, given the amount of time the Phillies dominated this thing. But the wind shifted. Once it did, you could feel the hurricane coming.

For 17 outs, Zack Wheeler was virtually unhittable. Not even virtually. The Braves did not hit him. Wheeler retired 17 of the first 18 batters he faced. Atlanta’s lone baserunner came by way of Trea Turner’s fielding error on a routine ground ball to lead off the second inning. Wheeler recovered from that one, striking out the next three batters he faced. Realmuto followed it up with a two-run home run in the third inning to give the Phillies a 3-0 lead. The whole sequence felt so methodical that the series felt over right then and there.

Things got dicey in a hurry after Wheeler allowed his second baserunner on a walk to Ronald Acuña Jr. with two outs in the sixth.

Ozzie Albies followed it up with a single that scored Acuña after Turner couldn’t glove a bouncing cutoff throw from Nick Castellanos. Up until that point, Truist Park felt like a place whose spirit had already left its body. A crowd of 43,000-plus was turning its undivided attention to the next college football Saturday. The home dugout was, too.

The Phillies still held a 4-1 lead, but the Braves suddenly held their first nugget of hope in 14-plus innings. They took full advantage.

After spending Game 1 pulling all the right strings, Phillies manager Rob Thomson came out of this one looking like he’d wrapped the whole ball of yarn around himself. Despite warming up José Alvarado in the bullpen during the Braves mini-rally in the sixth, Thomson brought back a clearly fraying Wheeler to start the seventh. The righty lasted three batters, the last of them Travis D’Arnaud, whose two-run home run with one out cut the Phillies’ lead to 4-3.

Thomson’s next decision also backfired. After Alvarado recorded the last two outs of the seventh, he replaced him with Jeff Hoffman for a righty-on-righty matchup against Acuna following one more out. Hoffman proceeded to hit Acuña with his first pitch.

The tying run was now on first base. The go-ahead run was at the plate in the form of Braves shortstop Ozzie Albies. Albies grounded out. Riley did not.

They had to make it interesting didn’t they? On the one hand, it was probably unreasonable to think that the Phillies would start this postseason with four straight wins, including two in dominant fashion against the regular-season champs in their home ballpark. October is no time to be greedy.

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On the other hand, if this best-of-five series was going to be tied at 1-1, the Phillies sure did it in the worst way possible. The first 32 innings of these playoffs were a sugar high. There was a moment in Game 2 when you looked at the 4-0 lead on the scoreboard and you listened to the apathetic boos from crowd and you couldn’t imagine a world in which the Braves arrived at Citizens Bank Park for Game 3 as anything other than ghosts of themselves, holidaymakers in waiting, paper champs once again.

It can be awfully devastating to lose that feeling. Hey, the Phillies say that their mental toughness is their strength. I guess now is the time to prove that once and for all.