Plaschke: The playoff demons are gone! Dodgers defeat Padres to advance to NLCS

This time they didn't choke.

This time it was they who choked.

On a glorious night amidst a churning sea of ​​cheerful blue, the Dodgers wrapped their worn-out arms around the Padres' Friday night game in San Diego and crushed those brown jerseys like an empty paper bag, finally breathing a sigh of redemption, relief and a coveted spot of just four World Series victories.

Winner Takes All Game 5 of the National League Division The Dodgers took all the criticism surrounding their last two postseason losses and buried them under a hail of fastballs and long balls in near-perfect style. A 2-0 victory over the Padres at an unabashedly jubilant Dodger Stadium.

The sins of their predecessors, the failures of previous seasons and the routine of post-season humiliation were buried.

Read more: The Dodgers overcame recent postseason frustrations in Game 5 of the NLDS with a win over the Padres

Buried from here to Chula Vista.

It was the first decisive postseason series victory in 11 years at Chavez Ravine Stadium in front of fans, and boy was it a sight to behold.

When Kike Hernandez threw the last ground ball to Max Muncy, the roofs of the pavilions collapsed, 50,000 fans jumped and roared in unison, Blake Treinen stood in the middle of it all on the mound, raising both hands to the sky as if in shock, the entire Dodgers team surrounded and squeezed him and jumped up and down as if she were screaming out two years of October pain.

“I Love LA” has rarely sounded louder, lasted so long, or been so filled with hope.

Later, in the champagne-filled Dodgers' clubhouse, Miguel Rojas raised his glass and shouted to the group that had shut out the Padres for the past 13 innings: “Hey, bullpen! This shot is for your boys!”

Dave Roberts then urged his team to keep pushing, with the manager shouting: “Eight more wins! And I'm telling you now, guys, I've never believed in a group of men more than I did in you. More importantly, each of you believed in each other.

The Dodgers now host the upstart New York Mets in the National League Championship starting Sunday, a seven-game matchup in which the winner advances to the World Series.

This will seem anticlimactic, and for good reason. The Dodgers should dominate. The outnumbered Mets made progress in the postseason thanks to small miracles. All the best Dodgers are muscular.

They proved that once and for all on Friday night against the Padres, who were arguably their biggest obstacle in their pursuit of their first full-season World Series championship in 36 years.

This first series was difficult. This was the one the Dodgers really needed. They began the tense evening amid memories of first-round exits in the last two postseasons, including a humiliation by these Padres in 2022.

Will they be able to shake off the demons of their history? Could they erase the memories of their failures?

Could they ever.

“We didn't come here to win the NL West; we came to win the World Series…we have to do it or we go home and think about it all offseason and the team goes to spring training to think about the losses of previous years, blah, blah, blah. Hernandez said.

They actually avoided blah, blah, blah.

They did it with wow, wow, wow.

It started with a shocking performance from a surprise starter, and struggling Yoshinobu Yamamoto finally earned a portion of his record $325 million contract by eliminating the Padres with two hits over five innings.

This continued with Señor October, the Dodgers' prolific October hitter, who sent Yu Darvish into the left field bleachers in the second inning. Hernández hit an incredible 14 home runs and 29 RBI in 188 postseason games, including three home runs against the Chicago Cubs in Game 5 of the 2017 NLCS.

“You've got to have the right attitude, the right mentality to come here and just find a way to dominate the day,” he said, noting that he envisions postseason success. “Just find a way, whatever you need to find, that when that moment comes, when that big moment comes and you step up to the table or whatever it is, don't let that moment make you too big, you feel like you're bigger than you were in that moment. moment and there is no moment that is too big for you.

His moment was followed five innings later by a similar shot into the left field stands by Teoscar Hernández, an underrated offseason steal by Andrew Friedman, an MVP not named Ohtani.

The game ended with the Dodger bullpen that was so brilliant in the do-or-die victory in Game 4, this time with four relievers holding the Padres hitless for the final four innings. The Padres ended the series without scoring in the final 24 innings, with Dodger pitching retiring the final 19 batters.

The crowd roared at every performance and held their water bottles to themselves, a worthy accompaniment to a band flirting with greatness.

“If there is one thing this crowd is, it is hunger,” said Kiké Hernández. “They want the championship. They want another one. The one we had a few years ago, the city couldn't celebrate it for obvious reasons. We know how much they want it… we just know that our fans support us and we are ready to give it our all.”

They rocked, the Padres were dumped, one October chapter ended, two more remain, and the once terrifying journey continues.

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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.