Boston is going to the playoffs, and the way they got there is the part that will outlive the celebration: the Red Sox became just the fourth team in the World Series era, meaning since 1903, to reach the postseason after being 14-or-more games under .500 at some point in the season. One hundred and twenty-three seasons of baseball. Four teams. That is not a hot streak. That is a franchise refusing to read its own obituary.

The clinch landed Sunday, with Boston and Tampa Bay squaring off in St. Petersburg and the standings doing the rest of the math around them. "Stayin' Alive" got its predictable spin in the clubhouse, and for once the song choice was earned rather than cute.

How did the Red Sox clinch a playoff spot after being 14 games under .500?

Fourteen under is a specific kind of hole, and anyone who has watched a season die knows the shape of it. It is not one bad week. Fourteen under means a rotation that could not hold a lead, a lineup that went cold for a month, and a stretch where the front office starts taking calls instead of making them. Teams that fall that far usually spend August auditioning kids and September counting down to the exit interviews.

What separates this group is that they never got to the counting-down part. A club has to play something close to two months of first-place baseball just to get back to even, and then it has to do the actual work of passing three or four teams that were already comfortable. Boston did both. That is a tell about a clubhouse that did not quit on itself in July, which is the month where most of these stories end quietly.

Has any MLB team come back from that far under .500 before?

checked the almanac, and the ghost at this party is the 1914 Boston Braves. Last place on the Fourth of July at 26-40, then a run that has never really been explained by anything but the calendar, finishing 94-59 and sweeping Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series. They have been the Miracle Braves for 112 years and counting.

The modern cousin is the 2005 Astros, who opened 15-30, got buried by every columnist in Texas, and reached the World Series anyway before the White Sox swept them. Different eras, same lesson: the standings in May are a weather report, not a verdict.

Boston now belongs in that conversation. Not as a novelty. As the fourth name on a list that took a century and a quarter to reach four.

What comes next for the Red Sox

The honest counterpoint, and there always is one: clinching and contending are separate skills. A team that spends five months clawing back to respectability has usually leaned hard on a short list of arms to do it, and October is unkind to tired bullpens. The comeback itself is the achievement. The seeding, the rotation order, the health of the guys who carried the load through the heat, all of that is still being written.

Around them, the bracket is filling in. Atlanta locked up the NL East on Sunday behind a four-run sixth in a 4-2 win over Houston, their seventh division title in nine years under first-year manager Walt Weiss. Philadelphia got Cristopher Sánchez's major-league-leading 18th win in a 7-2 handling of the Mets. The contenders are sorting themselves out in the usual orderly way.

Boston did it the other way. Sideways, uphill, with the lights off.

What I am watching next is whether the Red Sox rest anybody now that the ticket is punched, and how the innings got distributed across that rotation during the run. A team this deep into a comeback has spent something to get here. October will tell us how much.