The Cubs got a second straight walk-off win over the White Sox on Tuesday night, 4-3, on an Alex Bregman RBI single, and they bookended it: Pete Crow-Armstrong led the game off with a home run that the wire says put him in the MLB record book. First swing of the night, last swing of the night. Everything in between was just the part where both teams tried to hold on.

That is the shape of a Crosstown game when it goes right. Nobody in this city ever wanted a tidy nine innings from it anyway.

What happened in the Cubs walk-off win over the White Sox

Crow-Armstrong hit the leadoff homer to open it. The Cubs won it 4-3 in the last at-bat with Bregman driving in the run. That is two nights in a row Chicago's North Siders have sent this series home in walk-off fashion, which is a specific and particular kind of cruelty to do to a rival twice inside 24 hours.

I want to be straight with you on the history piece, because that is the part everybody is going to repeat wrong by lunch. The reporting has Crow-Armstrong doing something no one had done before with that leadoff home run, and I do not have the exact record language in front of me yet, so I am not going to dress it up and guess at the wording. What I can tell you is that a 24-year-old center fielder now owns a line in the book that nobody had touched, and he got it in the game his city cares most about. That is a hell of a way to file it.

Why a Cubs-White Sox walk-off still hits different

Because it is not a novelty game anymore and it never really was. checked the almanac: these two franchises met in the 1906 World Series, White Sox in six, the Hitless Wonders over a Cubs team that had won 116 games in the regular season. That is the deepest well any city rivalry in this sport gets to draw from. Everything since is a footnote to it, and everybody involved knows it.

So when the Sox lose one on a walk-off and then come back the next day and lose another one on a walk-off, that is not a bad week. That is a story their clubhouse carries. And Bregman, who has spent his career being the guy other people's fans learn to hate, walks into a rivalry he did not grow up in and immediately does the most Bregman thing available.

What comes next for both Chicagos

They play again Wednesday afternoon, 2:21 ET at Wrigley, which is the perfect start time for this. Day baseball, wind doing whatever the wind decides, a visiting team that has now had its heart handed back to it twice in the same building.

For the White Sox, the honest read is that they have played two games good enough to win and lost them both by a single run in the last frame. That is not a talent verdict. That is the cruelest version of the same result, and the only cure is getting a lead into the ninth and keeping it.

For the Cubs, the thing worth tracking is Crow-Armstrong's first at-bat every night. A center fielder who can change the top of an inning with one swing is a different animal than a center fielder who runs well and catches everything, and right now he looks like both.

I will be watching whether the Sox can get to the ninth with the lead this time, and I will be watching Crow-Armstrong's first swing of the afternoon. Two things, one game, both of them fun.