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The same holds true in major league baseball, where, after five months of ice cream dripping over the lip of souvenir cups, and rocket blue skies lit with buttercream sunshine, teams test tired legs, sunburned arms, turgid swings and info-stuffed brains in what will be the hardest and most crucial 30 or so games of the regular season, no matter how analyticians feel about wins in April counting the same as wins in the fall.

We’ll discover which players have the stomach for late innings charged with standings intrigue, and who among managers can keep one foot on the top step of the dugout while holding their nerve, the home or away crowd braying behind him. We’ll find out who hits best in long sleeves and what infielder is still able to glide across the field in September the way they would in late spring, insouciant and oblivious to the mounting pressure of the day.

Call-ups impress, relievers hang on, and, in the case of Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw and, possibly, the Jays’ Max Scherzer, September means perhaps one last chance to take in the gait, chaw cheek, and disco leg kick of soon-to-be retired pitchers who might as well have been here forever.

The 2025 Blue Jays are first in their division with some air between them and Boston and New York. But, in September, the script can flip fast. Past pennant races have been traumatic, cathartic, desolate, distressing, joyful and as wild as a tea cup ride, pulling and spinning a fan’s emotions game to game, inning to inning, pitch to pitch.

After easily enjoying life, and baseball, through the thick of the regular season, you’re suddenly more aware of other teams the way you’re more aware of neighbours you haven’t seen, or stores, buildings and intersections that you swore weren’t there in April.

The summer of 1987 was the greatest summer of my life — I toured Canada for the first time and followed the best team in baseball (ours) as they crushed the rest of the league — but the autumn was my worst, watching through my fingers as the Jays lost seven straight games, three to the Brewers at home, then four to Sparky Anderson’s Tigers, blowing a three and a half-game lead with one week left.

The losses were as sickening as the wins of 2015 were glorious; 43-18 through the last two months with a team that grew from an awkward teenager to an aspirational adult. That September, every game found new ways to delight, but it was ’87, or earlier, in ’85, when we learned what it felt like to have a team come up behind us the way a police cruiser rising in the rear-view mirror makes you tighten, just so.

In ’85, the Yankees, dormant for much of the year, roared to life down the stretch, waking from its cave to try and deny ɫɫ�� its first division title. As young fans in a young baseball city, fear and doubt spat and cackled on our shoulders, and when the lumbering catcher Ron Hassey hit a home run on Sept. 13 to defeat the Jays and narrow their lead to just one and a half games — this after leading the division since early May — we looked for cracks in the sky, expecting it to fall.

In the roaring cauldron of old, terrible Yankee Stadium, the baby Jays — Bell, Moseby, Barfield, Fernandez — looked, in their powder blues, like melting birthday candles, but, willing a miracle from their bats, they won the next three games, inspiring a Village Voice headline that I clipped and pasted to the dashboard of the family car: JAYS JUNK BRONX PUNKS. LEAVE YANKS IN FUNK.

September will wrench your nerves, twist your stomach and worry your soul, but, like W.P. Kinsella wrote on the Globe Sports front page on Sept. 1, 1985, “Not every fan gets to feel this.” You could be sad and perpetually defeated in Pittsburgh, or worse, Colorado, whose team was eliminated before the spring draft. You could be an Orioles fan, bearing witness to the sudden withering of its vine, or the Athletics, playing in the one city that wants them, but whom the team doesn’t want.

The stress and anxiety you will likely feel over the next four weeks — roughly 270 innings — should be considered a gift — a very difficult, yet beautiful, gift — and even when you feel like dying, you’ll feel wholly alive. You’ll cheer your team hoarse with one eye on the field and another on your phone, refreshing the out of town scores. For months, you told yourself: “Ah, the Yankees and Red Sox; pffffft, they’re no good.”

But deep September baseball reminds even the wisest diamond sage how little they know. Just because the weather gets cool, that doesn’t mean that we will be.