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TORONTO — Last week, the city welcomed baseball back for the first time in 670 days.

If the Blue Jays — now winners of seven-of-eight games since returning home — continue playing out of their minds, it could be time to start thinking about welcoming postseason baseball back to Toronto for the first time since Oct. 19, 2016, too.

While it’s clearly premature to start printing tickets with 55 games to go, the Jays are an energized ball club playing good baseball at an important time and they’re starting to make up ground in not only the American League wild-card race, but the AL East chase, as well.
It’s already shaping up as an epic sprint.

“I’m expecting it to go down to the wire,” Randal Grichuk said moments after a wild win Friday night in the series opener against the Boston Red Sox. “I wish we could play all the teams even more in September just to create more drama. It’s four really good teams, really good offences, really good pitching staffs and it’s going to come down to the wire.”

It was all on display Friday night in an emotional win over the division-rival Red Sox, one that featured a nine-run outburst in the fifth inning that had the BoSox reeling and benches almost clearing after Grichuk was hit by a pitch and warnings were issued.

Despite just 14,719 inside the dome, the place felt playoff loud and it felt more like 30,000 when the red-hot George Springer banged a two-run ground-rule double over the wall down the left field line to break things open at 9-2 in a wild bottom of the fifth.

“They’re bringing the energy and we feel it,” Grichuk said. “It got loud and we love that. That pumps us up.”

But the real theatrics started two batters earlier when Grichuk was hit by a Hansel Robles pitch on the heels of an Alejandro Kirk single, with the Jays already having scored seven in the inning.

Robles stared down the Blue Jays dugout, many expletives were exchanged, and at one point a handful of Jays streamed out onto the field, with big 6-foot-6, 260-pound Alek Manoah leading the charge and hopping the railing with ease.

“We put up a seven-spot and a guy gets hit pretty hard, so you’ve just gotta have your teammates’ back, man,” Manoah said. “Whether we thought it was intentional or not, that doesn’t even matter. There’s only one person that truly knows and that’s the other pitcher. We’re just out there trying to compete, trying to win a ballgame. We know the heat of of the moment, but at the same time, we’ve got our guy’s back no matter what.”

With comparisons to 2015 running rampant these days, the scene, while a bit more muted, was eerily reminiscent of Aug. 2, 2015, when Aaron Sanchez plunked Alcides Escobar and the benches cleared at Rogers Centre against the Kansas City Royals.

Earlier, in the top half of the fifth inning with the Red Sox up 2-0 and looking for more, Manoah escaped a bases-loaded jam by getting J.D. Martinez to pop up a slider down in the zone.

Manoah got a taste of the Toronto baseball fans and he wants more.

“It was electric, man,” he said. “I can only imagine what 50,000 in here is going to feel like.”

While the 23-year-old starter didn’t have his best swing-and-miss stuff on this night, he battled across five innings and 93 pitches, allowing just two runs and giving the second-best offence in the American League time to go to work.

Even though the 2015 and 2021 clubs couldn’t be more different in terms of personnel and collective age, if the Jays stay on this heater through the month of August, they’ll be impossible to ignore.

The Jays will now send their best three arms — Robbie Ray, Jose Berríos and Hyun Jin Ryu — to the bump over the next two days to finish out their most important series of the season thus far.

“We’re a really good ball club,” Grichuk proclaimed. “We believe it in there.”