How are the Phillies channeling their NLCS Game 7 heartbreak? Players who have been there know.

As the party raged outside, the Houston Astros retreated to the visitors’ clubhouse at St. Louis’ old Busch Stadium and slumped at their lockers. Nobody talked. The mood was funereal.

Then, after several minutes, Jeff Kent stood up.

“I want you to remember how this feels,” the All-Star second baseman said.

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It always stings to get booted from the baseball postseason, no matter the circumstance nor the year (Kent’s speech, recounted this week by former Phillies closer Brad Lidge, was from 2004). But the pain does tend to dull with time. Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, and, before you know it, spring training brings healing and renewal.

Unless the vanquishing occurred one win shy of the World Series.

In that case, the ache might never truly go away.

“It’s definitely there in spring training,” said Lidge, who recorded 29 saves and a 1.90 ERA for the ’04 Astros. “You get this sense, it’s that feeling of, ‘We were so freakin’ close, and this year, we’re going to make sure we get back there.’”

But how many teams that lost the winner-take-all game of a League Championship Series actually did get at least that far the next year?

It felt like a relevant question this week, as the Phillies returned to Chase Field in Arizona, one of the scenes of their NLCS meltdown last October.

First, a history lesson: MLB created the LCS in 1969 as best-of-five preludes to the World Series. In 1985, the format changed to best-of-seven. There have been 108 series to award the National League and American League pennants. Thirty-one went the distance, including two last year, when the Phillies and Astros fell in decisive LCS games to the Diamondbacks and Rangers, respectively.

Now, some cold, hard facts: Of the previous 29 Game 7 losers (or Game 5, pre-1985), 15 didn’t make the playoffs the following year, although more than half of the misses were before the wild-card era, when fewer teams were granted entry into the tournament. Nine got back to the LCS. Five, including Lidge’s Astros in 2005, won the pennant.

Only two — the Curse-busting 2004 Boston Red Sox and 2021 Atlanta Braves — won the World Series.

“You know if 90% of your main core returns, you feel like you’re going to be right back in the same situation [in the LCS],” Lidge said. “The confidence of thinking that you’re going to be back there because of your ability is extremely high. But you also realize that when you’re in that situation, literally anything can dictate the outcome of the game.”

Surely, it speaks to the inherent randomness of short postseason series that a team can get so close to the World Series one year and barely be in the same area code the next.

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But what about the road to the postseason? How much fuel can players derive from losing in Game 7 of the LCS? Can the disappointment carry a team all the way through the 162-game grind and into October?

In separate phone conversations this week, Lidge and former New York Mets third baseman David Wright reflected on their experiences with Game 7 losses in 2004 and 2006, respectively, and brought perspective to how the Phillies might be channeling their defeat last year.

After Endy Chavez’s homer-robbing catch at the left-field wall and Yadier Molina’s go-ahead two-run homer in the top of the ninth, the 2006 NLCS between the Cardinals and Mets at Shea Stadium boiled down to this: Adam Wainwright vs. Carlos Beltrán with two out and the bases loaded.

Cue the knockout curveball that froze Beltrán like an ice sculpture.

“You remember that feeling for the rest of your life, that deflated feeling of walking off the field — in our case, at home,” Wright said. “The game was this emotional high-low. It’s this feeling as a young player of like, ‘I don’t want to feel this again.’ It kind of pushes you and motivates you that much more in the offseason to come to spring training to take that small next step.”

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It largely was an unspoken feeling, according to Wright, who couldn’t recall a team meeting in spring training in which Game 7 was explicitly referenced. But the Mets returned nearly the same team in 2007 and started 34-18, a 106-win pace through the end of May.

So, maybe Game 7 was a motivating factor.

“Yeah, it carried us for 5½ months,” Wright said. “Having experienced winning, running away with the division in ’06, coming so close to going to a World Series, watching the team that we barely lost to go on to win the World Series, it definitely springboarded us into ’07.

“[The 2007 season] didn’t end the way that we had hoped, but, certainly, it gave us a head start from the experience that we got in ’06 and that thrilling game and that thrilling series. So, sure, I definitely think that it can be a springboard.”

That certainly was the case for the Phillies. Unlike in 2022, when their magic-carpet ride to the World Series ended abruptly, they stewed for months on losing Game 7 to a team that they believed they should’ve beaten. Even in spring training, players referenced it frequently.

“You’re not ever going to get over that Game 7 loss,” Bryson Stott said. “It shouldn’t have went to Game 7. You’re never going to get over it fully.”

Said Nick Castellanos: “I had a real hard time enjoying any part of the offseason, even when I was on vacation, just because of how bitter [last] season ended.”

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The Phillies ran back the roster and rode that lemony/Brussels sprouts taste to a 36-14 start, the best 50-game record in franchise history. They were 45-19, a 114-win pace, after a June 8 victory in London. At their high-water mark, on the eve of the All-Star break, they were 62-33.

Wright wasn’t surprised.

“It is addictive and it is intoxicating when you experience the thrill of not just the playoffs but Game 7,” he said. “It becomes this yearning for more and this desire to feel that excitement on a baseball field again. With us, you could tell from the guys early on in spring training that it was this will to try to not have that heartbreaking feeling again.”

But how far can a team ride that emotion?

There’s a reason more teams don’t rack up 100-win seasons. Over 162 games, periods of struggle are nearly inevitable.

For the 2007 Mets, a 6-13 finish — coupled with Jimmy Rollins’ “team to beat” Phillies’ 16-6 surge — cost them a playoff spot.

In 2005, a 16-31 start almost slayed the Astros.

“The feeling of being that close [to the World Series] is there in spring training, and it fuels a team to (a) remember you’re really good and (b) gosh, if we can hold everything together, we’re going to get back in that same scenario,” Lidge said. “But we started off so terrible that we were faced with an entirely different challenge. All of a sudden, we had a different motivating factor.

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“Even though we were that close the previous year, that didn’t really propel us so much as, ‘Oh, we’re going to really have to step on the gas.’ Yes, we have a great team, but we have to play like that the rest of the way to be able to get back to where we were.’”

Outsiders gave them no chance. When they were 19-32, the front page of the Houston Chronicle featured a tombstone that read, “RIP Astros season: April 5, 2005-June 1, 2005.”

But in the clubhouse, Lidge recalled, the Astros barely wavered. It helped to have Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, and Roy Oswalt in the starting rotation. And the core of the team largely was unchanged from the year before.

There was something else, though, that enabled the Astros to extricate themselves from early-season quicksand, and it was related to Kent’s speech after Game 7.

“We knew from the year before that we had as good a chance as any team to represent the National League in the World Series,” Lidge said. “The confidence from being in that situation, you feel like you just know you’re going to be right back in that situation. So it just never felt like our record was an indicator of our ability as a team.

“It was like, ‘We’ll get there. It’ll be fine.’ Yes, we started off about as bad as you possibly can, but it just didn’t feel like we were ever out of it.”

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The Astros went on a 41-16 roll through June and July, climbed back into the playoff race, clinched a wild card, and ousted the Braves in the divisional round. Then, they turned the table on the Cardinals in the NLCS, just as the Red Sox did with the Yankees in 2004 after losing in 2003. The Braves did the same to the Dodgers from 2020 to 2021.

As Lidge sees it, the 2005 Astros’ path is applicable to the Phillies, who recently went through a 4-13 slide that had fans in a tizzy.

“It’s OK that they’re not playing or pitching their best right now,” Lidge said. “You’d rather have something like this happen during the course of a season instead of just steamrolling everybody the whole way because it helps people readjust and realign and reassess things before the important stretch happens.”

Then, in October, tap into the memory of the Game 7 gut punch and ride the emotion.

“That’s when you feel like this group in the clubhouse is easily good enough to be in the World Series,” Lidge said. “All that you remember is that you’re really good.”