Like the 1980 team, these Phillies have a ‘sense of urgency’ to win it all. Can they get it done, too?

Larry Bowa, 79 years young, with 60 years in professional baseball, still walks through the Phillies’ clubhouse every morning in spring training and most days when the team is at home during the season.

It’s his natural habitat.

But this year, something felt even more familiar than usual to Bowa. Forty-five years ago, he played shortstop for the Phillies amid impossibly high stakes set by ownership: Win the World Series, after three near-misses, or invite drastic change to the roster.

» READ MORE: Bryce Harper is ready to become Mr. Red October again for the Phillies. There’s only one thing missing ...

These days, it isn’t quite so explicit. But it is assumed.

“I don’t think they remember ’80,” Bowa said of the 2025 Phillies, the oldest of whom (reliever David Robertson) wasn’t born until 1985. “But I do think they feel that same sense of urgency. You hear the chatter in the clubhouse — ‘Hey, we’ve got to get this done.’ Because we’ve come up short here.”

In 2022, the Phillies won 87 games, quenched a 10-year drought as the last team in the postseason, and floated to Game 6 of the World Series. With a largely static nucleus, they won more games — 90 in 2023, 95 in 2024 — but lost in the playoffs one round earlier — NLCS in 2023, division series in 2024 — in each subsequent season.

And here they are again, back in the tournament after a 96-win regular season. The divisional round starts Saturday in Citizens Bank Park against the defending World Series-champion Dodgers.

Whenever this run ends, Kyle Schwarber, J.T. Realmuto, and Ranger Suárez will be free agents. Bryce Harper will be 33, Trea Turner and Aaron Nola 32, Zack Wheeler 35 and trying to come back from thoracic outlet decompression surgery. Together, they will have had four cracks at winning it all. In modern pro sports, rosters don’t usually stay intact for this long.

So, there’s a sense around the Phillies — and it has existed since they gathered in Florida eight months ago — that this may be the last dance for the first core of the Harper era.

» READ MORE: How far will the Phillies go in the playoffs? Outs 13-21 will likely determine their fate.

“Well it could be, for sure,” president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski said this week. “Because we do have a lot of free agents. You’ve got the stars, and you also have some back-end guys on the pitching staff that are in that situation. I’m hopeful that we’ll retain most of the guys, if not all the guys. But I’m also realistic that it’s not going to be easy.”

Besides, if the Phillies fall short of a championship again, change will be expected, if not demanded, by a restless fan base. And maybe even a demanding owner.

Just like it would’ve been in 1980.

In 1976, the Phillies won 101 games and made the playoffs for the first time in 26 years. Not many people complained, then, when they got swept in the NL Championship Series — by Cincinnati’s powerful “Big Red Machine,” no less.

But the Phillies lost again in the NLCS in 1977 and 1978. They signed Pete Rose as a free agent, adding him to a lineup that featured longtime teammates Mike Schmidt, Greg Luzinski, Bowa, Bob Boone, and Garry Maddox, but missed the playoffs entirely in ‘79.

It prompted a meeting with principal owner Ruly Carpenter.

» READ MORE: ‘You’ve got a closer.’ How the Phillies nabbed Jhoan Duran and Harrison Bader at the trade deadline.

“He basically got the core group together before spring training in ’80 and said, ‘Hey guys, as much as I respect you and love you to play for the Phillies, if you guys don’t go deeper here, I’m going to have to break this team up,’” Bowa recalled. “That seed was planted in spring training. And as we progressed through the season, none of us forgot that conversation.

“We came up together. We learned how to lose together. We learned how to win together. And it was something that knocked us together and made you think a little bit, saying, ‘Man, this could be the last time I play with Schmidty, or this is the last time I play with Bull or Booney.’ And it hits home a little bit.”

Schmidt doesn’t remember a win-or-else ultimatum from Carpenter. But he said the players were acutely aware of their reputation as “a team that can’t play in the pressure of the postseason,” a weight that they felt whenever they lost three games in a row.

That “big boulder,” as Bowa put it, didn’t lift until at least they got past the Astros in an epic NLCS. For some players, it wasn’t until Tug McGraw struck out the Royals’ Willie Wilson to win the World Series.

Four decades later, another generation of Phillies bears an equal burden.

“I think there’s similarities, for sure,” Schmidt said this week on Phillies Extra, The Inquirer’s baseball podcast. “I think they feel the pressure of going further. I think they feel a similar pressure that we did related to their history in the postseason.

“We had to shake that off.”

A lot of the fingers pointed at Schmidt, among the best players in the sport but a .182 postseason hitter without a homer entering the 1980 playoffs.

Even in Game 5 of the 1980 NLCS, Schmidt struck out with the tying run on third base in the eighth inning and again to lead off the 10th. Both times, Del Unser followed with big hits: first, a game-tying single; then, a double to start the go-ahead rally.

Schmidt wound up going 8-for-21 (.381) with two homers and seven RBIs in the World Series and taking home MVP honors.

“I’ve always said Del Unser got the two biggest hits of my life two times after I failed under pressure,” Schmidt said, laughing. “And that’s what it takes. Somebody pinch-hits and hits a bases-loaded double or something to come from behind and win a game by one run. Key hits in key moments in big games is what wins championships.”

Who will get those hits for these Phillies?

How long did it take John Middleton to get over the Phillies’ Game 7 loss in the 2023 NLCS? Or their divisional round vanquishing by the Mets last year?

“If you’re using the phrase get over it,” the Phillies owner said in spring training, “it’ll never happen.”

Middleton grew up here. He has been a Phillies fan all his life. And as angry as he was when last year’s playoff run ended after only four games, he leaned on his knowledge of the franchise’s history to put the defeat into context.

» READ MORE: The Phillies are once again poised for a World Series run. The plan this time: Whatever it takes

“Philadelphia has seen this play before,” Middleton said, recounting the year-to-year extremes of postseason outcomes during the Schmidt/Steve Carlton years. “I think people need to recognize that we’re a really good team. Sometimes you just get players who perform better in a moment in time, and sometimes you get players who don’t perform better.

“When a Hall of Fame third baseman has a really, really strong postseason, you win. And if he has another year where he doesn’t hit as well, it’s hard. But that happened. It’s hard to win.”

For these Phillies, it will never be like 2022 again. Simply making the playoffs was enough then. The standard is higher now. Expectations are greater.

And time isn’t infinite. Teams get only so many chances to win it all before changes must be made.

“Certainly none of us are getting younger, so we know that time is a real thing and Father Time is coming for all of us,” Realmuto said. “There’s definitely a sense of urgency in this group. There’s no secret how much we all enjoy playing together, how much this team gets along. We love each other.

“But we want to win together really badly. I don’t want to say that we see it as an expiration date, but we have a lot of urgency to reach that goal of winning the World Series this year, for sure,” Realmuto said.

Said manager Rob Thomson: “Every year since ’22, I truly believe there’s a little bit more motivation. Because they know that we’ve missed some opportunities. It’s tough to get to the playoffs; it’s tough to go all the way. But every year, I think we get a little hungrier to get it done.”