Imagine the excitement in the Twins’ draft room three years ago if scouts had known that the lefthander they took in the third round would one day stand on the Target Field mound and lead his team to a victory that clinched qualification for the play-offs.

Cade Povich actually achieved that on Friday.

Now imagine those scouts if you told them that Povich’s brilliant two-hit performance in 5⅔ innings would come against the Twins, essentially eliminating the team that drafted him and handing him a $500,000 signing bonus would pay for the play-off battle.

Baseball can be a cruel game.

Mathematical elimination finally arrived for the Twins, with Friday’s 7-2 surrender at the hands of the former Twins looking like the instrument of their downfall. Kansas City lost in Atlanta to keep the Twins’ dreams of a miracle alive, but Minnesota’s own offense, which managed just two hits in the first eight innings, crushed the loss.

“It’s a big, big disappointment. We entered the year hoping to recreate, if not surpass, the feelings we were able to experience in a very, very good 2023 season,” said Pablo López, who started three consecutive Twins losses to end the season to close. “We can only hope that as a group we do all the (necessary) self-reflection to find those moments and figure out what we could have done better, the things we could have done well.”

That process begins now, manager Rocco Baldelli said.

“Really, you look at it in the big picture. You look at how the season went as a whole,” Baldelli said. “We’re also going to look at how the last six weeks have gone, because that’s what a lot of us are feeling right now, what a lot of us are talking about right now. And that is understandable.”