TORONTO – Six months of grinding to qualify for the meaningful games of the seventh are over and this Toronto Blue Jays season spent walking through a dream continues, with the chance to push back the awakening deep into October. An American League East title, the club’s first since 2015, secured Sunday by Alejandro Kirk’s two home runs in a 13-4 win over the Tampa Bay Rays, helps clear that path, advancing them directly to the division series after a 94-68 finish, a 20-game jump from a year ago, when all this seemed so far away. The seeds of 2025’s success, however, were planted amid 2024’s ruin, surviving some early-season tumult before taking hold May 28, when Bo Bichette’s pinch-hit two-run homer in the ninth inning at Texas gave his team a 2-0 win, the start of a 68-40 run to the finish line.Watch as Alejandro Kirk keeps the Blue Jays’ offence humming with a two-run blast, his second home run of the day against the Rays.Still, the past week-and-a-half threatened multiple times to veer from dream to nightmare, a four-game losing streak on the heels of six straight wins, allowing the New York Yankees to creep back into the picture, after a K.C. post-season berth clinch, two losses to the Boston Red Sox stripped away what little margin for error remained. But Daulton Varsho’s grand slam in Thursday night’s 6-1 win over Boston helped key a last weekend flourish, which set up a dramatic Game 162 to decide whether the Blue Jays or the Yankees claimed the AL’s top seed and first-round bye, or played in the dreaded wild-card round against the Red Sox. The Yankees, 3-2 winners over Baltimore, handled their end of the matter, forcing the Blue Jays to win to claim the East.“I just think it’s so important not to panic in hard times – we leaned on each other and that’s kind of what we’ve done all year,” Ernie Clement said after Saturday’s 5-1 win. “When things get tough, it’s easy to panic and start begging for stuff to go your way. But I think we did a really good job of weathering the storm. And our pitching staff has just picked us up in a huge way. Every guy in there has been amazing and the last couple games, they’ve continued to do their job.”The swing from one road to the other is a massive one for the Blue Jays, who, after using ace Kevin Gausman versus the Rays, would have been in a challenging spot with their pitching had they needed to play Tuesday, instead of Saturday like they will now. Watch as Toronto Blue Jays outfielder George Springer crushes a two-run home run to pad his team’s massive lead in the final game of the season against the Tampa Bay Rays.With five days to rest now, they can reset their heavily worked pitching staff, line up as they see fit to face the Yankees-Red Sox winner, be able to activate both Chris Bassitt and Ty France from the injured list, and buy more time to heal for the sprained PCL in the left knee of Bichette, who wouldn’t have been ready for the wild-card round.Sunday’s victory, before a raucous and energetic crowd of 42,083, was more difficult than the final score suggested, as Gausman battled through 3.2 innings of heavy traffic, as the Rays worked him for four runs on eight hits and two walks. Only a crucial Mason Fluharty strikeout of Jonathan Aranda with the bases loaded to end the fourth kept the Blue Jays’ lead at 5-4, whittled down by a three-spot that inning. Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s RBI single in the first inning had tied the game 1-1 before Kirk’s grand slam opened up a big lead, and the Blue Jays restored some breathing room in the fourth, when Clement singled, was sacrificed to second by Myles Straw and brought home by an Andres Gimenez sac fly. Kirk’s two-run shot in the fifth made it an 8-4 game before a five-spot in the seventh, featuring two-run homers by Addison Barger and George Springer around a Straw RBI triple, gave team staff time to prepare for a champagne shake-and-spray.Schneider joked before the game about being “hour-to-hour with tummy troubles,” but at the same time, “the anxiousness right now, today, comes from 365-days-worth of stuff that comes down to one day.”By the time the seventh was over, only counting outs to the celebrations amid rolling “Let’s go Blue Jays” chants remained.