September baseball is well underway, which means things are changing around Wrigley Field.

The air is chillier. The days are getting shorter.

And most of all, the buzz around a Chicago Cubs team gunning for a postseason appearance for the first time in five years is only getting stronger.

Following an emphatic series-opening victory over the Washington Nationals on Friday afternoon, that buzz remained. A healthy 5.5-game buffer sits between the Cubs and the San Diego Padres atop the National League Wild Card standings, meaning Chicago is still firmly in the driver’s seat with 21 regular-season games left to play.

“I think this time of year — it really is kind of a separator,” Cubs shortstop Dansby Swanson told reporters postgame after his three-run home run helped lift the Cubs to an 11-5 victory. “Teams can really hone in on what’s important … you’ve done so much tough work to get to this point to be able to not only finish this regular season strong, but to go into the next part of the season feeling really confident.”

The Cubs have already seemed to turn a corner when it counts the most. They’ve won 13 of their last 20 games — a far cry from the clouds that shrouded them when they began August with a 5-8 record.

Now, they’ve clawed back from what was, on Aug. 18, a nine-game NL Central deficit to the Milwaukee Brewers, and sit just 5.5 games back.

“(It’s) also feeling really fresh mentally and physically. A lot of that really just comes down to the brain, right?” Swanson told reporters. “Just committing to it, staying committed to the things that you know, you’ve been doing all year that have led to the success at this point. I’m not concerned about this group in any fashion.”

As the season winds down and the playoff push ramps up, the mental aspect is exactly what the Cubs are focusing on. They don’t want to see a repeat of their September 2023 collapse, which saw them drop 15 of their final 20 games en route to missing the postseason completely.

It’s why manager Craig Counsell has been tweaking the little things, like giving a struggling Pete Crow-Armstrong two games off to regain his confidence at the plate. Crow-Armstrong returned from that mental break on Friday to the tune of two hits, two RBI and a run scored.

Counsell pushed to bring another veteran presence aboard in Carlos Santana, and it’s already worked wonders for Crow-Armstrong and the rest of the clubhouse.

The team is also being incredibly cautious with Kyle Tucker, who exited Tuesday’s 4-3 win over the Atlanta Braves early with calf tightness and has not played since, missing two games with his return still up in the air.

“Everything that we do here is to make sure the guys are taken care of and going to be healthy for what’s most important,” Swanson told reporters of Tucker.

Much of the current Cubs roster, like Swanson and Tucker, has yet to experience playoff baseball with the team. As is the case with Crow-Armstrong, some have yet to play in the postseason at all.

But Swanson, a 2021 World Series champion with the Braves, knows exactly what it takes to remain calm and confident as October becomes the light at the end of a grueling 162-game schedule. He’s seeing that pay off with the 2025 Cubs.

“There’s a lot of work behind the scenes that goes on and we have so many guys who have done so much work,” Swanson told reporters. “You do a lot of work in the offseason in the beginning of the year, and just staying consistent with it — that really makes a difference at this time of the year. And so, I feel like we’re pretty well-positioned to go do what we need to do.”