In the frenzied minutes after Major League Baseball’s July 31 trade deadline, three of us writers at The Athletic filed our annual list of winners, losers and snoozers.

We labeled 10 teams as trade-deadline winners. Some were bad teams capitalizing on a seller’s market. Others were contenders appropriately addressing needs. The Philadelphia Phillies and San Diego Padres landed elite closers. The New York Mets and New York Yankees rebuilt their bullpens. The Houston Astros brought back an old friend.

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Now those teams are in another column: Postseason losers, if they made it at all. But we might also be losers. Only one of the teams we named trade-deadline winners reached the Championship Series: the Seattle Mariners, who acquired Josh Naylor and Eugénio Suárez. We had the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays as losers, and the Milwaukee Brewers as snoozers. Considering how those takes have aged in the past 75 days, there’s a lesson to be learned: Even if the entire industry is bagging on a team’s inaction or overpay, there can be an enormous gulf between our expectations of what it’ll take to win a pennant and the reality of October baseball.

Now, as both Championship Series get underway, let’s see what lessons we can draw from how these four teams reached the ALCS and NLCS.

Los Angeles Dodgers

The lesson: When well-laid plans go awry, be flexible and creative

Enlightened as I would look if I went with a far simpler lesson — spend all the money and get all the good players — the story of the Dodgers’ postseason so far has not been t