And now you go back, not a year, but five months, as dusk crowds evening’s plate and September baseball is again at hand. You go back to April, to the day these TinCaps arrived, to a kid named Rymer Liriano.

He was just 18 years old then, but potential, that poisonous word, rode shotgun with him. A young Sammy Sosa, they called him. Could hit, could hit for power, could run, the whole package.

“I’m ready,” he said then, and you could go around the room that day, to Everett Williams and Edinson Rincon and Nate Freiman and Jeudy Valdez, and you would have heard the same thing.

I’m ready …

They might not have been then. Tonight we’ll find out if they are now.

“It will be different,” TinCaps manager Jose Flores warns. “It’ll be tougher.”

Sure. Tonight, after all, they get Great Lakes, the best team in the Midwest League the way the TinCaps themselves were a year ago at this time, and maybe youthful verve wins out over absurdly veteran presence, and maybe it doesn’t. That it is youthful verve against absurdly veteran presence is irrefutable; the TinCaps have 10 players on their roster who are 21 or younger, while the Loons have 14 who are 23 or older.

The smart money’s on the Loons, in that equation. On the other hand … if the smart money were truly smart, it would shun three-game series like seven kinds of plague. All you need is one great pitching performance and a bank heist in another game, and you’re moving on.

“Who knows? We might get 8,000 tomorrow,” Flores says. “And it’s a different type of ballgame, just because it’s a playoff atmosphere. There’s a lot more things going on, and everything is more focused. We’re just gonna have to wait and see what happens.”

What’s clearer, at this point, is that all those eager kids in the TinCaps clubhouse that day back in April are for the most part still here, and they’ve done exactly what they were supposed to do.

Liriano never quite found his footing at this level, but across the room, Williams is still here, having hit five homers and 25 doubles and driven in 59 runs. Rincon batted .250 with 13 dingers and 69 RBI.

Freiman tied for the team lead with 14 homers, and batted .294. Nineteen-year-old Jonathan Galvez (.259, 10 homers, 49 RBI) found his voice. Jason Hagerty and 21-year-old Daniel Meeley both batted .300. In all, nine TinCaps batted .250 or higher.

So they’ve got the sticks. And in Game 1 starter Matt Lollis, they’ve got a 19-year-old whose 5-2 with a 1.66 ERA. And if the bullpen is nothing like last year’s, this is, again, a three-game series.

I’m ready …

You can say that in April, and it’s only words. Now, though, is when you either prove it or not. Now you throw out all the numerical evidence that you have, in fact, grown as a player, and show the world just how much you’ve grown.

“There could be a good chance of that,” Flores says. “Especially for the younger guys, and mainly speaking for the Latin kids who for the first time are involved in something like this, you get to see the adrenaline, and it’s a little bit more than what they’ve shown all year.

“So you will see a difference, just because of the mentality we all have during these times. It’s just a matter of them trying to stay within themselves and not try to do too much.”

A matter of, you know, being ready.