On Oct. 30, 2024, the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the New York Yankees 7-6 in Game 5 to win the World Series four games to one, finishing a comeback that turned a five-run deficit into a championship parade.

The Dodgers did not win the title by cruising. They won it by surviving. After falling behind 5-0 early at Yankee Stadium, they chipped back with a five-run fifth inning, then pushed ahead again with two sacrifice flies in the eighth. The final six outs were tense, but Blake Treinen held the eighth and Walker Buehler, in one more unexpected twist, came out of the rotation and into the save. When the last out was recorded, a roster built to chase October relevance finally crossed the line.

Freddie Freeman was named World Series MVP after continuing his extraordinary series with a two-run single in the fifth and a total of 12 RBIs, tying the World Series record. Mookie Betts also delivered when it mattered, driving in the go-ahead run with one of the two sacrifice flies in the eighth. Those moments mattered because they turned a game that had looked like a Yankees cushion into a Dodgers celebration.

The championship had been years in the making. Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman had repeatedly described the club as living through a golden era that had not yet been validated by enough postseason success. The organization doubled down over the winter, adding Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and Teoscar Hernández, and bringing Clayton Kershaw back. The result was a regular season with 98 wins, an 11th NL West title in 12 years and the kind of depth needed to survive injuries and playoff pressure.

That pressure never really went away. Ohtani dealt with a scandal involving his former interpreter. Betts broke his hand in June, Freeman played through a badly sprained ankle and the pitching staff lost key arms at different points in the season. Even in the postseason, Los Angeles had been pushed to the edge by the Padres before stabilizing. Game 5 was the proof that the roster could absorb chaos and still win the last game it needed.

The title was also a clean line through Dodgers history. It was the franchise's eighth championship and its first full-season title since 1988. Manager Dave Roberts became only the third manager in team history with multiple World Series titles, and the club will get to celebrate the kind of moment its owners had demanded when they said that anything short of a championship would be a failure.

For a team that spent much of the decade being told it was close, this was the night when close became enough.