FORT WAYNE – And here is how it turns around on you, this devil baseball:

One second Rymer Liriano’s jumping on a pitch and roping it into empty green space, the ball curling so expertly away from an enemy glove that old men shake their heads and mutter, “He can’t miss.”

A second or an eyeblink or a shallow breath later, he’s waving helplessly at strike three, smashing his bat on home plate with a flat crack and carrying it back to the dugout like an armload of kindling.

You saw the first in the sixth inning Sunday night, the TinCaps down 3-0 already, Game 1 against Lansing slipping away with every fastball Keyvius Sampson couldn’t get down and every base runner his teammates left hanging. You saw the second two innings later, with the score now 4-1 and the squandered chances beginning to haunt in earnest.

Five outs later, and that score was your final. And, yes, this is how it turns around on you, this is how what’s starting to feel like destiny becomes desperation in a little less than three hours on a Sunday evening.

“Your momentum,” TinCaps manager Shawn Wooten reminded everyone, “is only as good as your next-day starter.”

And if that was Wooten’s ace on Sunday, taking the hill for a team that had won six of its last seven games and was beginning to look like not just a tough out but no out at all … well, here again was the game’s caprice rearing its snickering head.

Jonathan Jones smoked a Sampson delivery to left to open the game, and the TinCaps’ righty was never really right after that, struggling with his location and finally departing after giving up three runs in six innings.

Liriano went 3 for 4 to continue his smoldering playoffs – in three games and 12 at-bats, he has nine hits – but his strikeout to open the eighth was one of 10 for Lansing starter Egan Smith and three relievers, including five in the last three innings.

And this is how it turns around on you, this game. Everything the TinCaps had done to everyone else in the past seven games – the timely hitting, the shutdown pitching, the production from the front end of the order – Lansing did to them instead. Half of the Lugnuts’ eight hits came from the top of the order. They strung together a double and a triple back-to-back to launch a three-run fourth. The Lansing bullpen allowed one base runner in the last two innings; Chris Bisson ended the game for the TinCaps looking at a third strike.

“Playoff baseball,” Wooten said. “They had some big two-out hits, kept a couple rallies going, (did) the small things that we’ve been doing. And that’s just the bottom line.

“We were on the short end of the stick, and we’ve been doing that to a lot of teams here in the second half.”

Not this time, though. The top five batters in the order, so noisy lately, were virtually silent, going 4-for-19. As a team, they were 0 for 10 with runners in scoring position.

And now it’s off to Lansing, where it’s either two wins on the road or the end.

“We just have to continue doing what we’ve been doing,” Sampson said. “Me not going out there and doing what I’ve normally done all year kind of got the tempo down in the game. As long we go out there and continue doing what we’ve been doing and keep the tempo up, we’ll be fine.”

Sure. After all, the game turned around on them once. Why not again?