Imagine the excitement in the Twins’ draft room three years ago if scouts had known that the left-hander they selected in the third round would one day stand on the Target Field mound and lead his team to a victory would ensure the playoff placement.

Cade Povich actually did it this Friday.

Now imagine those scouts if you told them that Povich’s brilliant two-hit performance in 5⅔ innings against the Twins would turn out and actually turn out the team that drafted him and paid him a $500,000 signing bonus would be eliminated from the playoff competition.

Baseball can be a cruel game.

With Friday’s 7-2 loss to the former Twins contender, which was the deciding factor in their downfall, the Twins finally reached mathematical elimination. Kansas City lost in Atlanta to keep the Twins’ dream of a miracle alive, but Minnesota’s own offense, which yielded just two hits in the first eight innings, dashed them.

“It’s a big, big disappointment. “We started the year with the hope of reviving, if not exceeding, the feelings that we were able to experience in a really, really good 2023 season,” said Pablo López, who ended the season with three defeats in a row had to accept the Twins. “We can only hope that as a group we do the (necessary) self-reflection to find those moments and figure out what we could have done better, what we could have done right.”

This process begins now, said manager Rocco Baldelli.

“Really, you can see it broadly. “Look at how the season went overall,” Baldelli said. “We’ll also look at how the last six weeks have gone, because that’s what a lot of us are feeling right now, a lot of us are talking about right now. And that’s understandable.”