Everybody has a plan, Mike Tyson once said, until they get punched in the mouth.
To become a heavyweight contender, the Cubs had to constantly bob and weave, hit below the belt a few times and get up off the mat over and over again.
So don’t pretend the Cubs knew it would happen like this or try to airbrush history and push the year-ahead-of-schedule narrative. The Plan wasn’t even necessarily supposed to be The Plan.
When Theo Epstein left the Boston Red Sox and took over as president of baseball operations, the idea of the Cubs fighting for the second wild card and finishing in third place in the National League Central by Year 4 would have sounded completely reasonable, maybe even a little disappointing.