LOS ANGELES -- The Padres spent the year building toward this moment. They swung trades early and often to bolster their roster. They reinforced it at the Deadline. In the second half, they jelled, and they rolled into the postseason on the strength of the best record in baseball after the All-Star break.

Quite a run for a team that had been written off at the outset. They’d overhauled so much of their roster in the wake of 2023's disappointment. Yet they still delivered a team that seemed legitimately capable of making a push for the first World Series title in franchise history.

Which made the ending on Friday night so positively agonizing. Nightmarish, even.

On the precipice of playing for a National League pennant, the San Diego offense -- the best offense in franchise history -- went ice cold. In Game 5 of the National League Division Series at Dodger Stadium, the Padres were shut out, 2-0, their season coming to a stunning conclusion.

All season long, the Padres had never gone 20 innings without scoring a run. Yet after their six-run barrage of a second inning on Tuesday night, San Diego wouldn’t score again -- ending its season with a stretch of 24 straight scoreless frames, the longest by any team in the postseason since the 1991 Braves.

For a team that scraped and clawed and rallied all season, the ending could not have been less fitting.

The Padres endured ups and downs in the first half of the season, but they came out of the All-Star break swinging. After a July 19 loss in Cleveland, San Diego was 50-50. It finished the season 93-69, the second-best regular-season record in franchise history.

The Padres took the NL West race to the final week of the season, then easily dispatched the Braves in the NL Wild Card Series. That set up the October showdown everyone had been waiting for.

The Padres and Dodgers had been trading punches since March when they opened the MLB season by splitting two games in Seoul. They staged some classics throughout the summer, then split two games in Los Angeles to start the series and two more in San Diego.

So it came down to one game on Friday night at Dodger Stadium.

Right-hander Yu Darvish mostly did his part. He posted 6 2/3 innings of two-run ball, allowing solo home runs to Teoscar Hernández and Kiké Hernández. But the Padres offense went ice cold at the absolute worst time.