The Brewers and Dodgers are about to test the old baseball adage that says, “Anything can happen in a three-game series.”

But can this Brewers team, the one that finished two games under .500, finished at the bottom of the National League with a 26.6 percent strikeout rate and was already missing its best starting pitcher before another went down on Sunday, really win the World Series?

“The record is kind of irrelevant for me,” manager Craig Counsell said. “It’s, ‘Get in.’ That was our job, to get in. We did that; we’re in three years in a row. That’s special. You can slice it any way you want it, but that’s special.”

How do they advance out of the Wild Card Series?
Win two games in three days. Seriously, it’s not more complicated than that. The Dodgers had the best regular-season record in baseball at 43-17 and the best record at home, 21-9. But there were 11 different stretches during which they lost two of three. It’s possible, even though the Brewers won’t get to run Corbin Burnes and Brandon Woodruff to the mound in the first two games, as they were scheduled to do before Burnes went down on the final Friday of the season with a strained left oblique. And even though they might also not have steady veteran Brett Anderson in reserve for a potential Game 3, after Anderson departed Sunday’s start with a blister.

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Getting past the Dodgers will probably mean maximizing Woodruff’s start, be it in Game 1 on short rest or in Game 2. It could also take some creativity, which is nothing new for a team that once sent Wade Miley to the mound at Dodger Stadium to start in the 2018 National League Championship Series in an effort to win some favorable matchups for Woodruff, who secretly warmed up to enter the game after one batter. Whether it worked is a matter for debate; the Brewers did get a matchup or two they liked, but the Dodgers won the game, and eventually, L.A. won the series, too.

A Brent Suter start to a bullpen day in Game 1 of the playoffs, anyone?

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“We're not afraid to do things unconventionally,” Brewers president of baseball operations David Stearns said. “I think we're going to be forced to do some things unconventionally over the next week.”

What does the blueprint for a championship run look like?
This gets trickier, since even if the Brewers stun the Dodgers in a short series, they would then have to navigate a best-of-five NL Division Series to get to a potential best-of-seven NLCS, which is the very earliest that the team thinks Burnes might be available to fortify the starting rotation. Even that may be optimistic, given the difficult nature of oblique injuries.

A quick comeback for Anderson would be very helpful. He has a long history of blister issues, so there is a good chance that he has a feel for his recovery timeline, even if the Brewers were not ready to share it publicly on Sunday. It would also take contributions from Josh Lindblom, who was 1-3 with a 6.46 ERA in his first seven starts, but seemingly rest things in a brief bullpen stint before going 1-0 with a 0.87 ERA in two starts before getting the hook with one out in the third inning in Game 2 of Friday’s doubleheader in St. Louis. And from Adrian Houser, who has the stuff to take a step forward à la Burnes, but failed to do so in 2020, when he had a 0.75 ERA through two starts and a 6.70 ERA in nine starts after that. Both Lindblom and Houser would have to contribute quality innings for Milwaukee to make a run.

Any way you look at it, the Burnes injury put a big hurdle in front of the Brewers.

“Look, this is a season where all of us -- we're all presented with unique challenges,” Counsell said. “Every day feels like it raises a hurdle for everybody, and when you keep getting hurdles put in front of you, it gets easier to say, 'Enough.' And to this team's credit, they've never said enough, you know? They've always, no matter what the hurdle or what the playoff odds look like, or they weren't swinging the bats, or if they weren't pitching well, they kept kind of answering that hurdle, and we've gotten ourselves to this day.”

What is one reason for concern?
That even if the Brewers piece the pitching together, they won’t hit enough for it to matter.

Measuring offense in 2020 is difficult; the Brewers just posted their worst team batting average ever (.223) and it wasn’t even the worst mark in the NL Central. In fact, it was second best. And this is the only division in baseball that sent four teams to the postseason. No Brewers team had ever made less contact than this one. In only 13 of the Brewers’ 52 seasons as a franchise did they score fewer than this year’s 4.12 runs per game, a list that includes the 1969 Seattle Pilots, the '70 Brewers in their first year in Milwaukee, the 2002 Brewers who lost 106 games, and the '15 Brewers who changed managers in early May to a former infielder named Counsell and began a rebuilding project.

“You battle to the end to try to find a way. Never give up,” said Christian Yelich, who has been trying to do that all season with a .205 batting average to show for it. “That kind of encapsulates our team a little bit. Every day is a new day, you just have to find a way to win. You never know when it’s going to change for you. That’s the game of baseball.

“For us, we got a new season. We have an 0-0 record. Everybody’s slate is wiped clean. It’s what you can do with the opportunity that we’ve earned. It’s going to be a lot of fun. We have a big challenge ahead of us.”