One minute, the Red Sox were sitting in great position, just six outs away from taking a 3-1 lead in their American League Championship Series with the Houston Astros β a win away from securing the American League pennant on the Fenway lawn Wednesday night.
The next minute, they were not.
The next minute, they were tied. Then they were trailing. Then they were trapped under an avalanche of Astros runs.
Like the New England weather, if you don't like how the momentum feels in a postseason series, just wait a minute.
That's how long it took for the Red Sox to go from being in command to being in trouble.
The home-field advantage that they earned with their split in Houston last weekend? Gone.
The sense of invincibility that enveloped them after they scored 21 runs in the previous two games, taking 9-0 leads in both of them? Evaporated.
Now, it's a best-of-three series with the Astros, with two of them played in Houston if the series goes the distance. And suddenly, it's the Astros who are flexing a bit, having survived the fourth straight game in which their starting pitcher failed to get them through the third inning.
The Astros have new life, and they can thank, in part, the Red Sox' offense for providing it. After scoring seemingly at will in Games 2 and 3, the Sox squandered one opportunity after another Tuesday night. That they were 0-for-9 with runners in scoring position only tells half the story.
They also managed exactly five hits -- two of them in ninth-inning garbage time, when they already trailed by seven runs. Over the first eight innings, with the game still in the balance, they collected three hits: one homer, one triple and one double.
"I know we only had (five) hits, but we had traffic the whole time,'' said Alex Cora. "We had a man on third, less than two outs with Kyle (Schwarber) and we didn't drive in the run (in the fourth inning). We had chances. I think we had chances early in the game, too, but I mean, we've been so good for so long that that you're going to have games like that.''
It's just that no one expected one after the way the Red Sox had regularly teed off on the same Houston pitching staff prior to Game 4.
Even when the Red Sox weren't making the kind of hard, consistent contact that marked the previous two games, they didn't completely abandon their approach. They struck out 10 times, but that hardly constitutes a night of wild swinging in 2021. And critically, they worked seven walks, providing themselves, again and again, with traffic on the bases.
The opportunities were there. The Sox had first-and-second with one out and the heart of their lineup coming up in the second, and couldn't score. They had a one-out double from Xander Bogaerts in the fifth and couldn't deliver him. And they wasted a leadoff walk to Hunter Renfroe in the sixth.
But rather than sting line drives all over -- and out of -- the ballpark, as they did earlier in the series, they fouled off some hittable pitches. In all, they left 11 on base at a time when a big hit here or there could have demoralized the Astros and pushed them to the ledge, with the Sox positioned to deliver the knockout blow late Wednesday afternoon.
Under Cora, the Red Sox have never lost two games in a row in the postseason. That had better continue Wednesday, or else the Sox will be packing their bags for Houston after the game knowing they have to win two straight at Minute Maid. Or else.
"You go on to tomorrow,'' said reliever Garrett Whitlock, who yielded a game-tying homer to Jose Altuve in the top of the eighth, "no matter what the outcome is that day. The next day, you got to win that day. So you turn the page. You know, you've got to go 1-0 for the day.''
What the Red Sox need more than anything, however, is a return to the kind of relentless offensive attack that typified their approach only two days ago. It may not be sustainable to average better than 10 runs per game for the entirety of a postseason series, but surely, the Red Sox need to give a better account of themselves than they did Tuesday night.
If it changed one way, from one game to the next, then it can change back.
Just 24 hours earlier, the Red Sox lineup looked like it couldn't be stopped. Now, if it's not quickly restarted, their season is in danger of being derailed.