Friday was one of the most compelling days of postseason baseball in recent memory, with Jose Altuve and Alek Thomas hitting home runs that are destined to live forever in franchise lore. It was just a breathtaking day of baseball. The ALCS will take a day off so everyone can go from one Texas city to another, but the NLCS suddenly has the same pivot game with a tied series the ALCS had on Friday. This is as tight and electrifying as postseason baseball gets. And we have so much more left to go.

It's a Game 5 in a tied series on a Saturday: It doesn’t get much better than that. Here’s a look at three key storylines for the NLCS Game 5.

Phillies at D-backs
Series tied 2-2
Zack Wheeler vs. Zac Gallen
8:07 p.m. ET, TBS

Storyline No. 1: After a wild bullpen game, is it time for a classic pitcher’s duel?

We certainly understand the traditionalists among you who looked at the listed starting pitchers for Game 4 of the NLCS and said, "Wait, who are these guys?” If you grew up in a certain era, it’s downright bewildering to see bullpen games this late in the postseason. But as we saw on Friday, these games can be exciting.

Both the Diamondbacks and Phillies had to empty their bullpens essentially from the get-go on Friday night, and it led to a series of wild fluctuations and fascinating twist-and-turns, with both managers pulling every lever at their disposal and eventually darned-near running out of pitchers entirely.

Given the pitching matchup on Saturday, it should be much more straightforward, and both managers are probably hoping they won’t have to do nearly as much strategizing. Zack Wheeler and Zac Gallen are two of the best pitchers in baseball, and while Wheeler had the upper hand in this matchup in Game 1, that was in Philadelphia. Gallen had a 4.42 ERA away from home in 2023, and a 2.47 mark at Chase Field.

Storyline No. 2: Have we seen the last of Craig Kimbrel in this series, and possibly for the rest of the postseason?

Kimbrel’s probably going to be in the Hall of Fame someday, and he’s on the short list of most dominant closers of all time. But he’d been playing with fire most of this postseason, and the last two games, he, and his team, have very much gotten burned. The game-tying homer he gave up to Alek Thomas in the bottom of the eighth on Friday might have been the biggest moment of this entire series, a series that has had plenty of them.

Kimbrel has now taken the loss in two straight games, and his inability to nail down the eighth led to a cascading issue for the Phillies -- it’s why José Alvarado had to pitch even though he looked gassed -- and that’s an issue that’s only going to get worse when they play their third game in three days. Kimbrel is one of the many veterans who have produced for the Phillies all year. But it's difficult to see how Rob Thomson could possibly trust him right now, and probably moving forward.

Storyline No. 3: Wait, are the Diamondbacks going to steal this thing?

The D-backs won their first five games this postseason, and while it wouldn’t be fair to call those wins an aberration or fluky, they certainly felt more like a good team on a heater rather than a great team playing at its natural level. When they lost those first two games in Philadelphia, including that blowout in Game 2, it felt like the floor had finally fallen out from underneath them: It looked like they might just get swept out of this whole series. And then … they just kept coming back.

Their eighth inning on Friday night was this whole postseason run in microcosm: Long odds against them, the world assuming this was about to be over, and then out of nowhere the D-backs just blitzed everybody. That Thomas homer was a jaw-dropper of a moment, and before you knew it, the D-backs had the lead, and then the game, and then the tied series. They’ve got their best pitcher going on Saturday, in front of a crowd that has seen two deeply thrilling days of baseball, with a chance to take control of this series and get within one game of their first World Series in 22 years. You didn’t see it coming. I didn’t see it coming. No one saw it coming. And yet: Here they still are.