Pressure? In the playoffs? Not for these Phillies, who conquered the bigger stress of getting here.

The Phillies would be soaked in champagne two days later, but their postseason dreams never felt more sobering than they did after losing by nine runs to a 107-loss Nationals team as the sand in the hourglass started to run out.

“We got whacked,” Rhys Hoskins said.

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Their lead in the wild-card standings evaporated and the blowout in Washington seemed like the siren of another late-season collapse. The Phillies, four weeks before they would open the World Series in Houston, looked cooked.

But the walls in the visiting clubhouse at Nationals Park weren’t closing in. There was no team meeting or rallying cry. The Phillies simply swapped their gray uniform tops for red, returned to the field a few hours later for the second game of a doubleheader, and won by six runs to steady their season.

“I’m always a big believer that the toughest thing to do is to make it in. Once you make it in, it’s just strap it on and go,” Kyle Schwarber said. “It’s all about winning baseball games. Now don’t get me wrong. It’s about winning baseball games through the course of the year, but when you’re looking at ‘Hey, we have X amount of games and we have to do this and make sure this happens, blah, blah’ ... It can be a little bit, trying to find the word I’m trying to say, in your head a little bit.”

Was it pressure the Phils were feeling at the end of the regular season?

“I wouldn’t say pressure,” Schwarber said. “But I would just say you’re thinking about that versus here, now, what do we need to do to win a baseball game? You play 162 of those things to get to this point and it’s very rewarding. Now it’s just baseball in its purest form. You’re trying to win a baseball game.”

Don’t call it pressure — call it weight, Rhys Hoskins said — but the Phillies were feeling something down the stretch. The Phils had faded each of the last four years and had not been to the playoffs since 2011. The players, even those who weren’t here as long as Hoskins, understood that.

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And that helps explain how they’ve looked like a different team in the playoffs. There’s no out-of-town scoreboard to monitor, no postseason drought to worry about, or standings to climb. The games have much higher stakes in October yet the Phillies found a way this month to play more freely against the Cardinals, Braves, and Padres than they did that day at Nationals Park.

“It’s a different weight,” Hoskins said. “It’s just win or don’t win. Win or go home, basically. Obviously, not all of these games are that situation, but when you look at it from a bird’s-eye view, that’s basically what it is instead of having one eye over here, one eye over here, listening back there. It’s fun. I like scoreboard watching at the end of the year. It means good things are going on.”

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The Phillies have a strong cast of clubhouse leaders, but Schwarber said nothing needed to be said in D.C. before the second game of the doubleheader. It was “pretty self explanatory,” Schwarber said. Everyone knew they simply had to play better. The team’s leadership and the steady hand of manager Rob Thomson have been obvious in the playoffs, but it was there in the regular season, too, with a calming presence in what could have been a dark moment.

“At that point, we had like six or seven games left and still knew we held on our destiny,” Hoskins said. “We knew what was at stake. There’s not much that needs to be said. That’s just us being prepared. We knew we had work to do.”

And then Schwarber homered on the first pitch of the game, alleviating the stress in the dugout and moving the Phillies closer to the playoffs. The Phillies huddled afterward in the clubhouse to watch Milwaukee lose at home to the Marlins. They now had a one-game lead in the standings. The champagne was soon on ice.

“I think over the course of the year we’ve had a few games like that,” Thomson said. “They’re so resilient and have a really short memory. They just come the next day and they turn it back on and forget about the day before. So the pulse is always kind of consistent.

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“It was even after that blowout in the first game of that doubleheader, because we were going in there looking to sweep and create some distance between us and the next club. So it was a disappointing game, but they just turned it back on in the second game, and that’s the way they’ve done it all year long.”

The Phillies enter the World Series as underdogs, just as they did against St. Louis, Atlanta, and San Diego. But they not only outplayed those teams, they looked like the looser bunch. The Phils already handled their stress. Now they’re in the postseason.

The Astros have won all seven of their postseason games, finished the regular season with the American League’s best record, and have a roster built to win in October. This is their fourth World Series since 2017 while the majority of the Phillies roster either never won a postseason series or even reached the playoffs.

But pressure? That’s not a word the Phillies are using. At least, not in the postseason.

“I always felt that the most pressure on our club was just getting in the playoffs, and once we got in, I thought that we’d be fine,” Thomson said. “So while I’ve always said that, I’m still a little surprised that that’s how we’ve handled it because I see everybody being so much calmer now than they were in September and coming down to the end because of all this talk of the September swoon, and I think it was kind of eating at them a little bit. But now I just see a really relaxed, calm, poised club.”

Join Scott Lauber and Alex Coffey, Phillies beat writers for The Philadelphia Inquirer, as they preview the World Series on Gameday Central, Friday at 6 pm at inquirer.com/PhilliesGameday