The champions have to survive these stress tests from the Yankees

Every champion has to figure out how to get through games like these two. There is no EZ Pass booth to Canyon of Heroes, no fast lane to drive past the fears of October. In a few weeks, you might be able to laugh about Thursday afternoons and Friday evenings.

When you line the streets of Lower Manhattan in a few weeks and Mark Leiter Jr. passes by on a float, you can give thanks for a most unlikely October helper, just as you will the faithful helpers: Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Judge , Juan Soto. By then your heart may no longer be in your throat.

But get used to it. This is October. That's the toll. This is the surcharge for the upcoming ticker tape showers.

“I want a ring,” Stanton said after the Yankees survived that 8-6 torture-chamber victory over the Guardians, a day after the 7-5 win in Cleveland that gave the Yankees something to think about, something to think about maybe had to worry.

How to get this ring. You have to figure out how to persevere. You have to figure out how to survive. Sometimes you have to figure out how to move on from a devastating loss, and the only way to do that is to avoid another devastating loss.

History is written by the victors.

And for the survivors, the World Series will be won.

“We were trying to get to the finish line,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said, “and I wasn’t quite sure how we were going to get there.”

Sometimes you have to make it up to people over time. Sometimes you have to improvise. That's the other thing about October. Once you're confident you know how a script resolves itself, warning signs and red herrings begin to appear on the pages. Then things get hairy. And then it's fun.

Soto had given the Yankees a quick 2-0 lead with a home run that quickly relieved them of the memory of Thursday's misfortune. Austin Wells made his first offensive appearance and added a solo shot. And then Cleveland captain Stephen Vogt somehow decided to pitch to Stanton with two on and Anthony Rizzo on deck and a lefty warm in the bullpen, and Stanton missed a baseball.

The Yankees were up 6-2 and Progressive Field briefly seemed to accept what seemed inevitable. But nothing is really inevitable in October. The Yankees bullpen is depleted. The arms out there dangle carefully. Leiter was inactive on Thursday morning and on Friday night he got two of the biggest outs of the year to end the seventh and eighth.

At this point the Guardians had tied the game. We can stop making jokes about the American League Central now. This team is not like the teams that gleefully mauled the Yankees like Mike Tyson once did to Michael Spinks in 91 seconds. This team is coming back. They came back on Thursday. They came back on Friday. It's hard to believe they won't come back again on Saturday, even after the Yankees scored twice in the ninth to put a dent in their latest comeback, even after beating Emmanuel Clase with one for the second straight day slingshot had destroyed.

“Last night was tough,” Wells said wearily at the end of the game. “That feels good. It was good to get through tonight.”

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Stanton said: “You just have to do it. There is no other way of thinking than this.”

That put them on the doorstep of their first World Series in 15 years. They'll give Carlos Rodon the ball on Saturday night and ask him to put them in a position to sit back starting Sunday and hope the Dodgers and Mets beat each other for two more days.

You have earned this place. No matter how confident they sounded after Game 3 and before Game 4, the fact is that the Yankees faced their first challenge of the season, their first stress test. And passed.

There will be more of that too. Don't worry. This is the way. This is the route. October is about darkness and light, about surviving the former and seizing the latter. It's about getting hit in the jaw, hitting the deck and trying to get back on your feet. It's about someone like Mark Leiter Jr. – not on the team at the start of the season, not on the roster at the start of the playoffs – falling out of the sky, making a few throws and stepping in.

Yes. They want easy-to-digest baseball games, so they move to Chicago and follow the White Sox. This keeps your blood pressure normal and bores you to tears. It's better to crawl to the edge of the abyss every few days, see if you can find your footing, if you can find your courage, and if you can fight back. That's what champions do. That's why you can swim in Canyon of Heroes.