CHICAGO — For Jed Hoyer, the dust hasn’t quite settled on what 2025 was for the Chicago Cubs.

Watch Jed Hoyer’s full end-of-season press conference only on the Marquee Sports Network app.

Four days removed from the Cubs’ NL Division Series loss to the Milwaukee Brewers, the team’s president of baseball operations sat inside the press conference room at Wrigley Field and offered his initial assessment.

“I think my emotion today has been disappointment,” Hoyer said. “Whenever you get into the playoffs, you start moving forward, and you have elimination games — the natural emotion is to think about the last thing that happened. Obviously, that was disappointing, and so we didn’t reach all of our goals.”

The Cubs’ first playoff run since 2020 ultimately proved turbulent. A Wild Card Series triumph over the San Diego Padres — the team’s first playoff series victory in eight years — was followed by dropping the first two NLDS games to their modern bitter rivals in front of a raucous Milwaukee crowd.

Then came the hope. Two wins at home and a series evened, powered by the deafeningly loud passion of a Wrigley Field throng that Hoyer said he hadn’t felt “since ’15 and ’16.”

For Hoyer, that’s what made the Game 5 loss that much more painful.

“I felt like our crowds in the playoffs were unbelievably impressive,” he said. “It didn’t come out of nowhere. It felt like sort of a natural build of the way the season was that, going back to April and May … people were really into it.

“I don’t ever remember players commenting on the crowds and the experience right after games the way they did repeatedly. I come down here after games, and the players would be talking about the energy or talking about the experience. That was really cool to see. It leaves you wanting more, right? The disappointment, in some ways, is not being able to continue to have more of that.”

The Cubs were ultimately ousted by a Brewers team that went on an unprecedented 38-16 run in July and August, came from behind to steal a division title and had just enough of the edge to win a playoff series in the two teams’ first-ever postseason meeting. Part of that edge was certainly the Brewers’ home-field advantage after securing their third straight NL Central title and their fifth in the last eight seasons.

Could Hoyer and the Cubs have done anything differently to combat that surge at the trade deadline? For much of the second half of the season, that was the narrative that shrouded Hoyer’s leadership as the Cubs’ once-scorching offense faltered and injuries to impact players like Kyle Tucker and Cade Horton marred the roster.

“When I think back on the most obvious thing that people talk about — starting pitching at the trade deadline — and honestly, like I haven’t really thought about that much since early August,” Hoyer said. “I know, to acquire players that could impact a pennant race, it would have cost us players that impacted our second half in a big way on the team.”

It was an answer along the lines of what Hoyer told the media immediately following the July 31 deadline — the Cubs simply did not want to get rid of young stars like Horton, Matt Shaw, Owen Caissie and Moisés Ballesteros, all of whom have the ability to see regular baseball with the Cubs in 2026. It would have been “detrimental” to the team’s future, Hoyer said at the time.

The concept of building for the future is another thing that Cubs fans hang over the heads of Hoyer and general manager Carter Hawkins. The ‘2032 Cubs’ comment that Hawkins made after the deadline only further fueled that discourse.

But with the emergence of top prospect debuts and the breakouts of stars like Pete Crow-Armstrong and Michael Busch, the 2025 season opened up a window for the Cubs that Hoyer wants to build off of. This was a team that won 92 games “in pretty convincing fashion” — the most during Hoyer’s reign as president thus far.

“We were fifth in baseball in run-scoring and seventh in runs allowed,” Hoyer said. “If we can continue to do that, we’ll be in good shape to move forward and get to the second part of the season. The margins were really close in the postseason, and we just have to continue to strengthen our roster in different areas to withstand that.”

And while there’s disappointment now, Hoyer said he anticipates a far more positive feeling when he looks back on the season as a whole.

“As I get away from it, I think my biggest emotion will be pride. I’m really proud of this team,” Hoyer said.  “We have a real foundation to keep building from. So obviously, I’m disappointed now. It’d be impossible to not have disappointment from falling short of the ultimate goal. But I am really proud of this group and proud of our season.”