CHICAGO -- Chicago Cubs pitcher Jake Arrieta, who is seemingly invulnerable to everything but kryptonite and Baltimore pitching coaches, does pretty much whatever he wants nowadays as he twirls his way toward a possible Cy Young Award and -- who knows? -- maybe the World Series.
The Cubs simply follow his lead, pushing and shoving their way to the front of the line.
But even Arrieta must bow the laws of Major League Baseball conformity and branding. When he tried to take a bottle of celebratory booze on stage for his postgame news conference late Wednesday night in the bowels of PNC Park in Pittsburgh, he was stymied for the first time in months.
He relinquished the bottle but gave up nothing earlier in the evening, pitching the Cubs to a 4-0 win over the Pirates in the wild-card game and into the National League Division Series against the St. Louis Cardinals. The series starts Friday night.
St. Louis has its Clydesdales, but Chicago has a horse in Arrieta.
Arrieta will pitch Monday night in the first home playoff game at Wrigley Field since the 2008 NL Division Series debacle. But first comes two games in St. Louis in the rivals' first playoff series in their storied history. Of course, given the Cubs' paucity of playoff opponents, that's not a surprise.
The last two times Chicago played in this best-of-five series, it was swept. The Cubs' win Wednesday was their first playoff victory since Game 4 of the 2003 National League Championship Series -- you know, back when Kyle Schwarber was still making Little League pitchers cry.
The road to the postseason is fraught with potholes in the infield and wild swings of chance. But teams like the Cubs seem sprinkled with fairy dust, or in their case, droplets of sparkling wine. Will the Cubs dry out this week?
"In October, you have a special team, and you want to see a special run," Cubs president Theo Epstein told me as the regular season ended in Milwaukee. "There's such an arbitrary nature to it sometimes. A ball bouncing a certain way or a bleeder down the line or something. You want to see teams get what they deserve. I think our guys deserve a lot."
Whether they get what they deserve is up to them. It's unlikely that Arrieta will walk seven guys like Ryan Dempster did against the Dodgers in 2008.
Jon Lester will presumably pitch the opening NLDS game and, behind their top two pitchers, the Cubs are sublimely confident about their chances to advance to the NLCS against either the Mets or Dodgers.
Big shoulders and big dreams.
That the Cardinals are in the Cubs' way is a sign of some kind of cosmic alignment. When Cubs manager Joe Maddon railed against the "Cardinals Way" last month after a couple of his hitters were hit, saying, "We don't start stuff, but we will end stuff," Epstein loved it. A big part of Maddon's job is to set the tone, and few do it better.
"It's great," Epstein said the next day at Wrigley Field. "It reminded me a little of 2003 [with the Red Sox], when we were starting to get the Yankees' attention."
Could this really be the Cubs' year? Or will this be like it was for the Red Sox 2003, when they came up a game short against the Yankees, only to win it all the next season?
The Cubs have the hitting, the defense and the coaching. The only thing they lack is a third top-tier starting pitcher. Kyle Hendricks and/or Jason Hammel will have to start against St. Louis, and while both of them had scoreless outings recently, pitching against the Cardinals in the playoffs is a different story.
Chicago's young hitters haven't been too intimidated, so no one should worry too much about them in this kind of atmosphere. Schwarber blasted a two-run homer off of Pirates ace Gerrit Cole on Wednesday and did a GIF-worthy bat flip to celebrate. Kris Bryant and Addison Russell will have big hits this series.
"You don't think these guys are 21, 23 years old, because they don't play like it," Arrieta said. "They elevated their play to a level that's beyond their years, and it's one of the big reasons we're here."
But nothing is a given. While the Cubs led 1-0 after two hitters, and it felt like they dominated Cole, who was pulled after five innings and two homers, most of the lineup didn't do much.
Five of the six hits Cole allowed were to Dexter Fowler and Schwarber, who combined to drive in and score all four runs. Next game, it might be Anthony Rizzo or Bryant carrying the load. We just don't know who will step up next, and that's the fun part.
Defensively, Maddon initially went with rookie corner outfielders in Bryant and Schwarber to get his best bats in the lineup. But Bryant, who moved from left field to third base late in the game, then made a couple of spectacular defensive plays at third. Russell bobbled a hard-hit ball by Andrew McCutchen to load the bases in the sixth but then started a double play on an even harder-hit ground ball by Starling Marte.
It was very un-Cub-like.
There is no question that this isn't some Cubs team of timeworn vintage, but rather a free-spirited group of dudes that is making its own luck. Great teams have their own narrative, and the Cubs' story is impatient youth.
The Cubs were seemingly put together slowly, like a recipe that takes years to bake, but then they cooked all at once. No one could have predicted 97 wins this season.
"This was honestly the best-case scenario in terms of the timetable," Epstein said last week in the Miller Park concourse.
And that's great! You can't plan everything, and who would want to? Certainly not Epstein, a baseball romantic at heart who read a "Baseball is Better" poem at his introductory news conference in 2011.
He is also too smart to think the Cubs will replicate this kind of season every year. This is a unique team unencumbered by history or expectations and living in the moment. That's why everyone around the Cubs was hopeful they could get over the hump against the Pirates, because after that, they would feel unbeatable.
"This team all year has that little bit of magic, and they've had a special feeling in the clubhouse," Epstein said. "It feels like the type of team that deserves a real run here, and you just want to see them have that."
The magic is in the work. The Cubs' young hitters have adjusted to minor slumps that often waylay inexperienced players. Several veterans have changed their swings for the better during the season -- including Starlin Castro, who has had an incredible late-season reversal of fortune. Credit hitting coach John Mallee, along with the hitters themselves, for making incremental improvements that have paid big dividends. As they say, the flap of a hitter's bat in the cage in August can lead to a World Series parade in October.
The buildup around the Cubs has reached a din familiar to those who have covered the team during their last three playoff seasons. There is an abundance of hope and almost a feeling of earned serendipity around the city. But I don't think this team is burdened by it all, because it happened so gradually. In 2008, we must have asked Mark DeRosa twice a day what it would be like when they won the World Series. We saw how that worked out.
With the franchise's first playoff win since the rookies were in grade school, the Cubs partied their brains out Wednesday, spraying champagne into the wee hours. No surprise. This is a team that practiced celebrating all season, dancing around with a smoke machine after mundane wins. They have bottle-popping muscle memory.
When they swept San Francisco in a four-game series in early August, players and front office officials partied together late into Monday morning, singing karaoke in Lincoln Park bars and making noise in downtown steakeries.
The fun-loving, homer-swatting, fist-pumping Cubs are more than ready for this moment, as quickly as it has come. Now are the Cardinals ready for the Cubs?
We'll find out. The moment is here.