MINNEAPOLIS -- A lot can happen in more than five hours at a baseball field.

Considering the records of the two clubs at Target Field on Monday night, it’s probably not accurate to call Monday night’s series opener between the Twins and Reds a heavyweight battle, but there were certainly blows traded -- and missed -- on both sides as the game carried on, and on, and on.

At one point, Miguel Sanó was used as a pinch-runner for the first time in his career. At another point, Jonathan India overslid second base and was tagged out to quench a Cincinnati rally. The Reds used two five-man infields. Somewhere in there, the Twins stranded the bases loaded three times -- including in the eighth and ninth innings.

And at last, Minnesota landed the knockout blow in the 12th inning with a two-run, walk-off homer from Sanó, finally winning the 7-5 war of attrition after five hours and 14 minutes, the longest game by time in MLB this season.

“It felt all of it,” said J.A. Happ, who started the game some eons before it ended. “I'm not surprised by that.”

The previous longest game of 2021 had been a five-hour, eight-minute tilt between the Astros and Padres on May 29. In fact, it was the longest game in baseball since the new extra-innings rules were introduced before the ‘20 season, and the longest by time since the Cardinals and D-backs played six hours and 53 minutes, and the Rockies and Giants played five hours and 31 minutes on Sept. 24, 2019.

It’s only fitting, then, that the night ended with Sanó wearing an upturned bubble gum bucket on his head -- placed there by Kenta Maeda -- amid a raucous, exhausted, slightly delirious celebration at home plate.

OK, more than slightly delirious.

“You reach the point where you go from good to maybe a little tired, then you get that weird energy where you start doing and saying weird stuff that you don’t normally think about or talk about,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “Then, depending on what’s going on in the game, you either find the second or third burst, or there’s a lull.”

With the hard-fought triumph, the Twins extended their winning streak to a season-high five games -- and they certainly did so the hard way after having first stranded a season-high 18 runners on base and having lost Byron Buxton again to a fractured left hand due to a hit-by-pitch, only three days after they got him back from a hip strain.

As a 3-3 game entered extra innings, the Reds appeared to kill Minnesota’s hard-earned momentum from the weekend with an RBI single from Nick Castellanos and a sacrifice fly from Eugenio Suárez that gave them a two-run lead. But the Twins, lackluster in extras for most of the season, found some of Buxton’s magic in his absence with a Luis Arraez RBI double and a game-tying sacrifice fly from Trevor Larnach in the bottom of the frame.

And at last, following two scoreless innings of relief from Matt Shoemaker in a game in which the two teams combined to use 16 pitchers, Arraez’s groundout to start the 12th moved automatic runner Andrelton Simmons to third, setting up Sanó’s blast over a five-man infield.

“In the toughest of spots, he came out there and -- we needed a lot of things today, we needed a lot of big moments, but Matt Shoemaker, he owns a handful of them tonight,” Baldelli said of the right-hander, who made his third appearance out of the bullpen after his demotion from the rotation. “He’s a big reason why we won this game.”

Twice, the Twins had the opportunity to avoid the lengthy back-and-forth. In the eighth, Alex Kirilloff caught the Reds napping and stole second on a heads-up play, which eventually led to a bases-loaded, two-out situation for Trevor Larnach, who grounded out and accounted for eight runners left on base. The ninth proved a better opportunity when two singles and an intentional walk loaded the bases again with one out, but a strikeout and groundout again killed the threat.

But thanks to the titanic efforts of the bullpen, from which six Twins relievers allowed two runs in 7 1/3 innings, all that proved moot -- and certainly made for, at least, a memorable day (and morning) at the ballpark.

“Those are the ones you really want to pull out,” Happ said. “You want all of them, but to kind of have our relievers come in and do the job they did and have us battle back, and just the way that it was going, that was a nice win for us.”