DENVER -- There are times during a baseball season when two consecutive losses barely even register. It’s a long season -- as players are quick to remind you from April through August. Sometimes, you lose a couple of close ones. No big deal.

This is not that part of the baseball calendar. This is late September. There are 11 games remaining in the Padres’ season. In an ever-tightening National League Wild Card race, two losses can feel like they’ve tilted the entire playoff picture.

These two losses sure did.

The Padres dropped their second straight on Friday night in Colorado, a 4-3 walk-off heartbreaker in 10 innings at Coors Field. Suddenly, their hold on a playoff spot feels awfully tenuous. While they were losing those two games -- including a 5-4 defeat against St. Louis on Thursday -- the Brewers and Phillies both won twice.

“This close to the end, definitely, those losses are really painful,” said Juan Soto. “But we’re still here. We’re still alive. We’ve just got to keep grinding.”

Soto’s solo homer in the top of the eighth inning tied the game at 3, before Alan Trejo lined a walk-off single in the 10th off left-hander Adrian Morejon.

And just like that, San Diego’s four-game cushion over Milwaukee for the final spot in the postseason is now two. Its lead over Philadelphia for the second Wild Card spot is no more, with the Phillies having moved half a game ahead of the Padres.

“Not every game is going to go your way,” Soto said. “But we’ve got to keep playing hard as we’ve been doing. Two close games. ... We've just got to go back at it tomorrow and find a way to win again. Keep playing hard, keep our heads up, keep playing good baseball.”

The Padres had reeled off an encouraging streak of five straight wins prior to Thursday’s loss. That brought them some breathing room. So does the fact that San Diego still holds the tiebreaker over Milwaukee and would reach the postseason if the two teams were to end up tied.

Still, it’s gotten a bit too close for comfort. On paper, the Brewers and Phillies have significantly easier remaining schedules than the Padres.

Then again, on paper, this was supposed to be the respite on the San Diego schedule -- three games against the last-place Rockies, who sit 21 games below .500. But it’s rarely that simple at Coors Field, where the Padres have now lost 14 of 15 dating back to last season.

On Thursday, manager Bob Melvin espoused confidence that this trip to Denver might be different.

“We just feel good as a team right now, and it’s a little different environment for us, in that every game feels like the last game,” he said. “I don’t think you go in thinking about what happened earlier in the season or what the track record is in any particular place. It’s just putting our best foot forward.”

And maybe they will. They’ve got ace Yu Darvish slated to pitch the second game on Saturday. Darvish has been the Padres’ steadiest starter all season, the guy they’d want on the mound when the stakes are so high.

They would have preferred to have held onto that cushion, of course. But it wasn’t to be. Starter Sean Manaea allowed three runs over 3 2/3 innings, a short start that unraveled in the fourth, when he allowed Yonathan Daza's go-ahead two-run triple.

“Not good,” Manaea said. “I just kind of felt like everything was cutting, and I just could not really throw the ball where I wanted tonight.”

To that end, Melvin could’ve lifted Manaea prior to the Daza at-bat. But at the start of a three-game series at Coors Field, he simply didn’t want to place that burden on his bullpen.

“I thought [Manaea] could get us through it,” Melvin said. “And now, we end up in a position where we use our closer in the ninth, lose in the 10th. Just trying to sneak another out out of him.”

Indeed, the Padres were forced to call for Josh Hader with two men aboard in the ninth, and he promptly escaped trouble, recording two outs on eight pitches. But Hader hasn’t pitched multiple innings in a game since the 2020 postseason. So Melvin called for Morejon rather than ask Hader for five outs.

“He hasn't done that in a long time, and we're not going to do that to him,” Melvin said. “I needed to get out of that in the ninth, and we did, so we went to Morejon.”

Melvin had another crucial decision to make in the 10th. Charlie Blackmon came to the plate with first base open. Despite the left-on-left matchup, Melvin intentionally walked Blackmon, reasoning he’d set up a potential double-play ball for Trejo. It took two pitches for Trejo to make Melvin and the Padres pay.