It was just two years ago that the Washington Nationals came from being an under-.500 team, 12 under after 50 games to be exact, to win it all. Along the way, they knocked off a Dodgers team that was supposed to be better than they were in a NL Division Series. This season, the Braves were five games under .500 in June and eight games out of first place. Now they are trying to knock off a Dodgers team that won 106 games this season in the National League Championship Series.

Two years ago, there was so much talk in the run-up to the Trade Deadline that Mike Rizzo, who runs the baseball operation for the Nats, might be a seller and not a buyer. Rizzo wasn’t. He made moves because he thought his team had a great chance. At the Trade Deadline of 2021, the baseball boss of the Braves, Alex Anthopoulos, did the same thing, picking up Joc Pederson, Eddie Rosario, Jorge Soler and Adam Duvall. Because he thought the Braves still had a run in them.

Rizzo did not give up on his team two years ago. Anthopoulos did not give up on his Braves in the summer of ’21. Two years ago, the best the Nats could do was get a Wild Card, because the Braves won the NL East again. The Braves? They won the East again this year, then they knocked off the favored Brewers in the NLDS.

We know where the Nats ended up. It’s where the Braves are trying to end up. It was a hard road for the Nats, trying to go through the Dodgers; the Braves learned that a year ago when, they had the Dodgers down, three games to one, in the NLCS. They also know that Dodger Stadium has always been a hard place for them to win.

They are still two victories away from the World Series in a year when people had a right to wonder if they were going anywhere, especially when they lost Ronald Acuña Jr. to a right knee injury in the middle of July. Atlanta had made up some ground from 30-35 when Acuña got hurt, but it was still just a .500 team, 44-44, at the time. Then the Braves won 44 more games the rest of the way, going 44-29. They went from being eight out in the NL East to winning the division by 6 1/2, a 14 1/2-game turnaround.

Can they be this year’s Nationals? We are about to find out. The team whose general manager didn’t give up after Acuña went down tries to get to the Fall Classic now, a place where the Braves seemed to be just about all the time back in the '90s.

“Alex did a great job,” manager Brian Snitker said not long ago. “He showed the players from the get-go as soon as Ronnie went down that he wasn’t going to sit around and not try and make this thing better. He does everything in his power to try and help this club, and the guys appreciate it. I think they respond to that, too.”

What was a model organization once for all of baseball, because of sustained excellence when John Schuerholz ran baseball ops and Bobby Cox was his manager, has become one again.

The Braves, as they have shown since the postseason began, can pitch and hit and are young, even without Acuña. They have power at every infield position -- Austin Riley, Dansby Swanson, Ozzie Albies, Freddie Freeman -- even with Freeman slumping the way he has against the Dodgers. Duvall, whom Anthopoulos got from the Marlins, had 22 home runs when the Braves got him and hit 16 homers after that. Rosario, another of the Braves’ Trade Deadline All-Stars? All he did the other night against the Dodgers was go 4-for-5 in the biggest game of his life and knocked in the winning run when his line drive to Corey Seager in the bottom of the ninth just ate the shortstop alive.

He is one of the four outfielders that Anthopoulos traded for when Acuña’s season ended, and so many around baseball thought the Braves' season might have ended in that moment. But in so many ways, with the Trade Deadline three weeks away, Anthopoulos’ season was just beginning.

“I just don’t believe you can have the mind-set of: You lose any one player and you just shut it down for the season,” Anthopoulos was quoted as saying after he had made sure there were reinforcements coming in Atlanta.

It was relief pitching that Rizzo sought in 2019, principally Daniel Hudson. He was 3-0 for the Nats, with six saves and an ERA of 1.44 over 14 appearances. Then Hudson got saves in the NL Wild Card Game for the Nats, got saves in three postseason games after that and was one of the guys with the ball in Game 7 of the World Series against the Astros.

Anthopoulos went for outfielders. Now the Braves have come all the way back to this moment from blowing that 3-1 lead to the Dodgers last year. Now they aren’t just trying to write the kind of baseball story the Nats did in Washington just two years ago, they’re trying to do it without their biggest star.

The Braves still thought they could win after they lost Acuña. So did their boss. Here they are.