This was supposed to be the end of the road, except it wasn’t. On a chilly and spooky Halloween night, the Blue Jays dropped a pivotal Game 6 matchup to the Los Angeles Dodgers to let go of the series lead and face their last elimination game. Nothing ever goes by the script in playoff baseball, and this time, the Blue Jays were the unfortunate victim of this unforgiving rule.

The Dodgers’ prized starter, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, wasn’t unbeatable, especially considering that the Dodgers lost the last 10 of 19 regular-season starts with the Japanese phenom on the mound. Patience was going to be a virtue in Game 6, and while the Jays fared better this time around against Yamamoto, he still held them to one run through six innings. This persistent confusion was clear when the Blue Jays continued to leave men on base over and over.

Despite the Jays’ struggles, Yamamoto grinded through his outing this time, proving that he, too, is human after all. He threw a whopping 96 pitches in six innings but still succeeded in keeping Toronto’s bats as quiet as possible. His success also came from the Blue Jays’ lineup pressing as a whole, rather than putting Yamamoto in an uncomfortable position. Even if the pitches went to a full count, Yamamoto regained his confidence by either inducing a sub-par quality contact or a strikeout.

Toronto’s offence was tenacious, torturous and gritty. Yet in this winner-take-all game, the offence couldn’t string together any meaningful hits to scare the Dodgers’ roster.

Rewinding the time all the way to the top of the third, the nightmarish “what could have been” situation played out when the Blue Jays intentionally walked Shohei Ohtani with Tommy Edman on base. Facing Will Smith and Mookie Betts was a better match-up for Kevin Gausman, hypothetically. The downside of any hypothesis is that there’s no guarantee that it will be proven correctly. Many experiments fail, and Toronto’s experiment went as awry as it could, as both batters helped Los Angeles score three runs in Gausman’s lone bad inning.

Those three runs were more detrimental than they should have been because the Blue Jays simply couldn’t find their rhythm at the plate, on the mound or on the basepaths. Besides relievers like Louis Varland, Mason Fluharty, Seranthony Dominguez and Chris Bassitt holding down the Dodgers’ offence, the Blue Jays couldn’t get the job done.

Even when the Blue Jays put the balls in play, they created more misfortunes. Perhaps the most egregious mishap was Addison Barger’s ground-rule double. The moment Barger’s hard-hit ball got lodged in the centre field, luck got sapped out of Rogers Centre. The eventual dead ball naturally left two runners on base instead of what should have been an advantage for the Jays, a run in their favour.

As if the agony wasn’t enough, Ernie Clement got a weak pop out at the first pitch Tyler Glasnow threw, and Andrés Giménez hit a line-out double play to hand over Game 6 on a silver platter to the Dodgers.

The unintended consequences of the Blue Jays’ befuddlement loomed large in Game 6. Kevin Gausman never received the run support throughout this World Series, despite his best efforts, while calls behind the plate and on the field built up frustration after frustration. But the cold, hard truth was that Toronto couldn’t cash in golden opportunities in each inning. In a game where every inch matters, all it takes for things to go wrong is one second of discombobulation.

The force of Halloween couldn’t be denied for the Blue Jays. Home teams have a record of 2-5 in World Series games played on Halloween since 2001, and Toronto couldn’t turn around this story, unfortunately. But now is hardly the time to linger in this searing pain.

Tomorrow is a new day, and the Blue Jays have a chance to play on a clean slate. This team has never made it easy on themselves from the start. The Blue Jays haven’t played normal games in a while. Might as well lean into that when there’s nothing left to lose.

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