MINNEAPOLIS -- It’s hard to believe that it was less than a year ago that the Twins were playing October baseball and exorcising their organizational demons with the long-awaited postseason success that certainly looked like it could serve as the building block for even greater heights to come.

That now feels like a universe away.

It would have been nearly impossible to imagine that, in a world in which three American League Central teams would be playoff-bound in 2024, these Minnesota Twins would not be in that bunch -- much as it would have been laughable to think that a Tigers team that was 11 games behind the Twins on Aug. 10 would eventually leave Minnesota in the dust.

But the seemingly impossible became cold, hard reality on Friday, when a 7-2 loss to the Orioles formally eliminated the Twins from playoff contention at the end of a stunning 12-25 collapse in their last 37 games.

That’s the third-worst record in baseball in that span since Aug. 18, better than only the 96-loss Angels and the 121-loss White Sox, a downturn all the more abrupt considering that, over the previous 103 games, dating back to April, they had owned the best record in baseball.

The Twins plummeted so quickly that this wiped out what had been a 5 1/2-game playoff cushion as recently as Sept. 5, when they owned a 95.4% chance at a playoff slot, per Fangraphs, and the fact that Minnesota owned every possible tiebreaker against Kansas City, Detroit and Seattle somehow didn’t end up mattering at all.

It’s the kind of collapse that will bring reflection, reckoning -- and, perhaps, reaction.