In the hours before Sunday’s regular season finale, there are mixed emotions in the White Sox clubhouse. The reality of losing the division title the night before has mostly sunk in, and with that brings disappointment and frustration.

“Those are the games we feel like we should win, especially in the tight race for the division and all that. But just gotta flush it,” Colson Montgomery said.

The need to move on quickly is because once the formality of game 162 — a 4-2 win over the Rockies — is done, the Sox have one day off to prepare for their wild card opponent, the Astros.

And with that, there’s energy. For some teams, losing the division means their season is over, but the Sox have their first playoff appearance since 2021 to prepare for.

“We’re not done. We’re going to the postseason,” Montgomery said. “We’ve got a lot of important baseball that’s coming up, and it’s going to be fun baseball too. And for us young guys, a lot of us have not been able to experience any of this stuff. So that’s all we have is excitement.”

Still, it’s hard for this not to feel like the Sox have come up short. They led the American League Central by 5.5 games on August 16 but had lost the division lead to the Guardians a month later. Now, instead of the Sox getting a first round playoff bye and a week off to rest their bullpen and set their starting rotation for the division series, that privilege goes to Cleveland.

No matter what the preseason expectations were, the Sox raised the bar during the course of the season. They went from a team just hoping to take a step forward from three consecutive 100-loss seasons to one expecting to win a division title, so losing their grip on the AL Central with just nine games left to play can understandably feel like a failure to both the people in the locker room and those outside of it.

But the Sox have an opportunity ahead of them to erase all of that by making a deep playoff run. One that, all too fittingly, would have them getting past the Guardians if they want to compete for the American League pennant.

As for the wild card series, manager Will Venable said he does not yet have a game one starter decided on, but when it comes to his overall pitching plans, fans should expect him to be as creative as he has been all season.

“I think everything’s on the table. I don’t think that there’s one way that we’re planning on going about this,” he said. “As we have done during the regular season; openers, using guys in different spots, I think we can expect all of that as well.”

Venable’s inventiveness has been necessitated by having one of the weaker pitching staffs in baseball, but it’s a quality as a manager that might work to his advantage in the postseason. October baseball has a way of forcing everyone to throw out the proverbial playbook to some degree, so Venable could be uniquely qualified to navigate the uncertainties of playoff games.

Just getting to this point is kind of remarkable, considering that the Sox were 60-101 going into the final day of the season a year ago, and the rapid dropoff from winning the AL Central in 2021. For a guy like Colston Montgomery, who was drafted in 2021, his tenure in the organization has mostly been defined by the White Sox struggling at the major league level.

And even this year, when his team got off to a slow start, it looked like 2026 would be another season of struggle.

“We started off 6-13, and that definitely could have been a time where you’re like, ‘Here we go again’ type of thing,” Montgomery said. “But it’s just not the mindset that we had. We all had belief in ourselves.”

Kyle Teel, who came to the White Sox in the December 2024 trade that sent Garrett Crochet to Boston, told CHGO he was excited to come to Chicago, despite joining the team just months after they had finished their record-setting 41-121 season.

“I remember celebrating just because I knew that it was a really good opportunity, and you know, it’s just trusting God’s plan. And look where we’re at now. I mean this is just amazing,” Teel said.

Looking ahead to the wild card series, the Sox will go to Houston to face the winners of the American League West, a division that came down to the final day and is unquestionably the weakest in baseball. If playoff seeding was awarded by regular season record, the Astros would be coming to Chicago.

As for the matchup itself, the Sox didn’t fare particularly well in the regular season, going 2-5 against the Astros. Most recently, the Sox dropped three games of a four-game series in Houston from August 31-September 3, right in the middle of the stretch that cost the Sox the division title.

But one of the beauties of the playoffs is that the postseason provides a reset for every individual player and for each team, and that regular season head-to-head records are rarely an indicator of how a playoff series will turn out.

“The ultimate goal of playing this game is to get in the playoffs. So the fact is, now we’re in and everything starts starts fresh,” Randal Grichuk said. “So it’s one of those things that the past doesn’t matter. It’s ‘What are you doing for me now,’ and ‘What are you going to do for me in playoffs?'”

The White Sox need a few players to get back on track this week, one of them being Colson Montgomery. Though he clubbed 31 homers and drove in nearly 100 runs this season, he also set the single-season strikeout record this year. Montgomery ended the season on an 0-for-24 slump, so the mental reset of the postseason might benefit him more than anyone else on the roster.

“The playoffs is fresh start, right? Stats 0-0-0 everything, and it’s one of those things that the past doesn’t matter,” Grichuk said. “Each game individually, each at bat could be a massive at bat, bigger than a regular season. You’ve already made it at that point. So I think it’s one of those things that, if you’re scuffing a little bit, you’ve just got to look at it as a fresh start. What’s a chance for me to take over and be that offensive force that the team needs.”

There are some injury questions going into the wild card series, as Davis Martin left Saturday’s game early and has an old calf injury that has caused him problems earlier in the season, and Chase Meidroth sat out two of the three games of the series against the Rockies with a balky hamstring.

But in both cases, Venable said had the Sox been playing for a division title on Sunday, Martin and Meidroth would have been available. So health-wise, it seems reasonable to expect that both will be on the wild card roster and available to play.

However far the White Sox go this postseason, the 2026 team will almost certainly go down as one of the most exciting teams in franchise history. From three straight 100-loss seasons to an 84-78 regular season record is by itself an achievement, but they’re not done yet.