When a team clinches a playoff berth, two quotes almost always come to my mind.

The first is from Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman, who told me several years ago — before Los Angeles had won its only championship since 1988 in 2020 — “If only one team has a successful year (the one that wins the title), that’s miserable.”

Friedman was offering his take on the cliché to stop and smell the roses. That there are triumphs along the way during the season — big wins, clinching a postseason berth, winning a division, capturing rounds of the playoffs — and that appreciating them and reveling in them is important because they are so difficult to achieve.

The other came about a quarter of a century ago from Paul O’Neill when he was amid the Yankees dynasty. “When you win, everyone had a good year,” O’Neill told me. His point was two-fold: One, even players who had a poor statistical season can cull a positive difference-making moment or three from a winning year. Second, it was a way to acknowledge that it does take a village, that a Homer Bush in 1998 or a Jose Vizcaino in 2000 could feel like a contributor even within a galaxy of stars.