When it was over on Tuesday night in Boston and the Red Sox had punched their ticket to The Trop and to more baseball, Alex Cora talked about Nathan Eovaldi, his starting pitcher, who had pitched so brilliantly until Cora came to get him in the sixth inning. It surprised Eovaldi, the way he was going. But maybe it figured. In a Red Sox season that has been one long surprise, it was just one more.

“Nate was amazing,” Cora said after the Red Sox's 6-2 win.

So, too, was the manager for the Red Sox this season, who is as much a star as any of them, Eovaldi or Rafael Devers or Xander Bogaerts, who hit that first-inning home run on Tuesday night that reminded you of the way Mike Tyson used to hit people in the first round when he was the baddest man on the planet, and then changed everything again with his cut-off throw to nail Aaron Judge at home plate when the game was still 3-1.

We know how Hunter Renfroe went past 30 homers and nearly got to 100 RBIs, and the way Kyle Schwarber hit after the Red Sox got him at the Trade Deadline, becoming a more important of an acquisition for his team than Anthony Rizzo and Joey Gallo were for theirs, and who hit one out of sight against Gerrit Cole when it was all on the line for him and his team.

But in the year when the Red Sox came back the way they did, three years after Cora’s club won 119 games in all and was the best team in Red Sox history, Cora sure came back, too.

He came back from his suspension because of his involvement with the Astros’ sign-stealing, came back from the Red Sox letting him go because of that. He came back to Fenway and did as much as anybody to bring the Red Sox back to one of the great October nights at Fenway Park, where they never trailed against the Yankees in the American League Wild Card Game.

Here is what Cora had said even before Tuesday night’s Wild Card Game, when the Red Sox had finally clinched a home game by coming from 5-1 down to beat the Nationals on Sunday (a day when Cora wasn’t afraid to pull Chris Sale early):

“I get locked in half an hour before the game in the dugout, but at the same time, I reflect, ’OK, this is cool' -- for all the right reasons. I’m not thinking back to what happened, but it’s like, ‘Don’t take this for granted. This is cool, regardless of the situation.’ I still enjoy it. I still have the passion. ... From my end, I appreciate everything. I’m not taking any day for granted. I love it. I love what I’m doing.”

And doing it as well as it can be done, as well as Gabe Kapler, another former Red Sox player, did with the Giants, and as well as Dave Roberts, who stole the most famous base in Red Sox history against the Yankees in Game 4 of the 2004 American League Championship Series, as Boston was mounting the greatest comeback in postseason history. Cora did his job as well as Kevin Cash of the Rays, whom Cora’s Sox will face in Game 1 of the AL Division Series on Thursday night. Cash was once a backup catcher with Boston in 2007, another time when the Red Sox won it all.

Somehow, around injuries and COVID, around not getting Sale back from Tommy John surgery until August, mostly around the way the Red Sox fell down after the All-Star break, Cora managed to keep the team from staying down. And perhaps the most masterful work of the season, up there above it all at least so far, was his handling of the bullpen.

Matt Barnes was an All-Star closer, until he wasn’t. Adam Ottavino had been swell as a setup man. Barnes seemed to lose his stuff and his confidence. So did Ottavino. But Cora somehow began to mix and match in increasingly creative ways. Hansel Robles, who pitched the eighth against the Yankees on Tuesday night, briefly became his closer. Nick Pivetta, a starter all year, closed out the Nationals game on Sunday.

Garrett Richards, who’d started 22 games, became a late-inning guy. Cora began to lean more and more on a big, talented kid the Red Sox got from the Yankees in the Rule 5 Draft, Garrett Whitlock. Whitlock pitched the ninth on Tuesday night. Tanner Hauck, another kid, came out of the bullpen to gas the Yankees in the seventh. And Ryan Brasier came back from injuries, and the death of his father, to pitch for Cora the way he had in 2018. Brasier got the ball in the sixth Tuesday after Cora took it from Eovaldi, who stuffed the Yankees in the Wild Card Game the way he had in Game 3 of the Sox-Yankees ALDS in ’18.

When no one saw any real possibilities for this Red Sox team back in Spring Training, Cora did. He believed. Great coaches and managers can sometimes make their belief their team’s belief. That is the way it happened in Boston this season. Devers is a breakout star, of course, a dazzling talent with the bat. Bogaerts has been a star for a while; it’s just taken people outside Boston too long to realize that. But so, too, is the manager. He’d never call his own work this season amazing. It is. Present tense.