CHICAGO — Carson Kelly was in a rut.

It was so tough that the Cubs and manager Craig Counsell decided to give him some time during the back end of the recent West Coast road trip. It wasn’t as highly publicized as Kyle Tucker’s time off earlier in the month, but after dropping the second game in San Francisco, Kelly sat out three of the next four games.

“Carson’s kind of been battling it offensively,” Counsell said after the Cubs’ walk-off, 7-6 win over the Atlanta Braves on Monday at Wrigley Field. “And we tried to give him a little break in Colorado — he’s been so important for us this year, and he’s been such an important presence on both sides of the ball.”

The Cubs catcher was the surprise story of the start of the year, hitting for the cycle in April in West Sacramento against the Athletics and posting an OPS of .899 at the All-Star break. But since the Midsummer Classic, Kelly had just two extra base hits, a double and a home run and none in the month of August as he hit .216 with a .542 OPS in that span.

So, of course, when the Cubs needed big hits on Monday, it had to be Kelly who delivered them. The Cubs’ backstop hit a game-tying, two-run home run in the eighth, then delivered the walk-off single down the left field line in the bottom of the 10th as the Cubs completed an improbable, five-run rally over the Braves. It’s a crucial win for a team that has the playoffs in its sights, with the NL Central at a distant — but not impossible — 5.5-game deficit and holding a slight, 2.5-game lead for the top spot in the NL Wild Card.

“I’m just happy for him,” Counsell said. “He was due for this. And he was due for a big one, but he had a huge game and two enormous hits and a really good win. Really good win.”

It marked the seventh walk-off win for the Cubs and tied their largest comeback win of the season, when they beat the Cincinnati Reds on May 25 after trailing 8-3 in the fifth.

“We kept fighting,” Kelly said. “We went down early, and kept fighting little by little by little, and just to get to be able to be in that situation is special.”

Kelly’s rough second half had him searching for answers. He dug into some of the data and numbers that the team provides and started making subtle adjustments on offense. But those things don’t happen overnight. It’s easy to adjust in the cage, off a tee or in batting practice, but it’s much different doing so against the best pitchers in baseball.

“Things take time, and over the course of a long year, there’s gonna be ups and downs, but today was a good step forward, and hopefully many more to come,” Kelly said.

If this is the first of many, as Kelly hopes, that’s a good thing for the Cubs. Part of what made the Cubs’ lineup so deadly in the first half of the season was the fact that it felt like they could do damage from spots one through nine. In the second half, the top of the order has slumped, and players like Kelly struggling in the middle have compounded the team’s issues.

Monday felt a bit more like that first half offense. They didn’t put up a crooked number in an inning and blow past Atlanta, but they kept putting together at-bats and chipping away at the game.

If that’s the case, then that’s a pretty darn good time to start hitting a groove.

“What makes this clubhouse so special is we’re always cheering for each other,” Kelly said. “That’s what we do, and we pick each other up. Whenever one guy’s struggling, we pick them up. And I think that’s contagious, and I think that’s what makes this team so special.

“Especially down the stretch here when things aren’t going right, we’re going to be able to scrap wins, and come back and be in positions like today. So I think that’s what makes this team special. We got another month to play, and we’ll see what happens.”