Time for Phillies and fans to believe again. First Cristopher Sánchez, then Game 5.

This one was the hard one. This one was the one where it was most likely to end. The Phillies weren’t dead because they had to win three straight games. They were dead because they had to win Game 3.

Well, something funny happened at Dodger Stadium on Wednesday night. As the field cleared and the clock ticked past midnight back East, the Phillies found themselves standing in a brand new day, still very much alive.

8-2, Phillies.

Game 4, Thursday.

» READ MORE: Hayes: Rob Thomson’s genius saves his job and the Phillies’ season with brilliant strategy in a Game 3 must-win

Cristopher Sánchez vs. Tyler Glasnow to send it back to Philly, where the winner will take all.

“It’s the same preparation for me,” said Sánchez, who held the Dodgers scoreless for 5⅔ innings before allowing a two-run double to Teoscar Hernandez that chased him from Game 1. “I prepare myself in the same way for every game. Whether we were up or down, I was going to pitch tomorrow either way.”

It will be the biggest start of his career, and the biggest game of the Phillies season since the last one.

A five-game postseason series is wild, man. Dumb. Very dumb. But, wild.

Less than 48 hours ago, it seemed like the Phillies would have been better off chartering a hearse for their cross-country flight to SoCal. Now, after one game, all that stands between them and a decisive Game 5 is their Cy Young ace against the Dodgers’ No. 4 starter, a righty who allowed four of 8 batters to reach base while pitching 1⅔ innings of relief and whom the Phillies torched in his one regular season start against them.

They also have a lot more wind in their sails at the plate. Kyle Schwarber will draw the headlines for his criminal treatment of a Yoshinobu Yamamoto four-seamer in the fourth inning. But the Phillies’ collective success went much deeper than Schwarber’s 455-foot blast that exited the seating bowl at Dodger Stadium and tied the game at 1. Yamamoto allowed five of the next eight batters he faced to reach base, leaving the game with a 3-1 deficit and nobody out and two men on base in the top of the fifth. You could see the momentum shifting in real time, even before they cracked it open with a five-run eighth against veteran lefty Clayton Kershaw.

» READ MORE: Phillies’ big eighth inning broke Game 3 open — and kept Jhoan Duran fresh for Game 4

To say that the Phillies have the edge wouldn’t be mathematically correct. But this series sure feels closer to even than to elimination.

“This is a game of momentum,” said catcher J.T. Realmuto, who continued his strong series by going 2-for-5 with a home run and a ground-rule double. “We obviously never lost confidence, but to go out there and perform the way we did today is only going to make us feel better about [Thursday].”

The Dodgers still hold a dominant position. If each game is a coin flip — the Vegas odds on Game 4 were near even at last check — there is only a 25% probability that the Phillies will win two in a row and advance to the NLCS. But it says something that the current series odds line up almost exactly with that. At -330 on FanDuel, the Dodgers have an implied probability of 76%. In other words, these are two evenly matched teams. The only difference between them is that one of them needs to win one, and one needs to win two. It will be 50-50 in Game 4, which sounds much better.

Game 3 was the one game in the series where you would have been a little nervous about the pitching matchup. Yamamoto has been brilliant this season, including in an April start against the Phillies, when he held them to one unearned run in six innings. Meanwhile, Rob Thomson made the surprising decision to start veteran righty Aaron Nola, who finished the regular season with a 6.01 ERA in 17 starts.

Turns out, the plan worked brilliantly. Thomson told Nola beforehand that he would let him go one time through the order, at which point he would turn things over to Ranger Suárez, who has a long track record of postseason success. After Nola went two innings, Suárez allowed a home run on his first pitch, a solo shot by Tommy Edman, then held the Dodgers scoreless through the end of the seventh.

The whole night was a much needed victory for Thomson, who saw nearly every consequential decision he made in the first two games of the series blow up in his face. Sheer chance says that at least one should have worked before now. In fact, much of the confidence that permeated the Phillies clubhouse after Wednesday night’s win was no doubt sourced from a subconscious understanding of regression to the mean. They may be down 2-1, but they have played this series pretty close to even. They sit in the same spot they were last season against the Mets, yet they have looked like a far more complete, capable team. The results weren’t there in the first two games. Last night, they were.

» READ MORE: Schwarbombs to the rescue: Kyle Schwarber breaks through with two homers to help Phillies force Game 4

The biggest key for Game 4 will be Sánchez pitching deeper than he did in Game 1. Keep the game away from the bullpen in the sixth and seventh innings. That’s the formula: Sánchez for seven, a well-rested Jhoan Duran for two.

Their backs are still against the wall. And, yet, somehow, this series is there for the taking.