Amidst the champagne-soaked celebration that happened in the home clubhouse in American Family Field in Milwaukee on Wednesday night, a clear — and difficult — reality set in for the Brewers’ division rivals 90 miles south.

“I think the message sent really is that, look, there’s a big gap,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said before Thursday’s series opener against the Nationals. “I mean, they’re ahead of us by a lot. It’s a talented team on and off the field. It’s a talented team, but there’s a big gap. And we got room to make up, there’s no question about it.”

The Cubs’ loss Wednesday to the A’s was the official confirmation of something that has felt like fait accompli for a while now — that the Brewers would win their second-straight NL Central crown. Entering Thursday, Milwaukee had an 11-game lead, 2 games better than last year’s margin over the Cubs at the end of the season.

“Frankly, that makes it daunting,” Counsell said. “They’ve been good, man. I mean, I’d say that about the other [NL Central] teams too, right? They’ve created a gap the last two years in the division. So, yeah, we got room to go, man.

“Like, we’ve got work to do, for sure.”

The season’s not over — the Cubs have 9 games left after Thursday and are 7 games back of the final Wild Card spot — but barring a historic collapse from Atlanta and New York and a season-high winning streak, the Cubs will be sitting at home for the postseason for the 4rth straight year. They haven’t clinched a playoff berth in a full 162-game season since 2018. And they haven’t won a playoff game since 2017.

It’s not at all how the season was supposed to play out for the Cubs. This was an 83-win team in 2023 that finished a game out of the playoffs. They brought back practically the entire core of that team and had poached arguably the best manager in the game from their northern neighbors.

Instead, the Cubs will have to win nearly 60% of their remaining games just to equal their win total from last year.

“We’ve got to get better, man,” Counsell said. “The team we’re chasing is [11] games ahead of us. We got to get better. And we should try to be building 90-win teams here. That’s what you have to do; that’s the playoff standard. That’s what you got to get to be safely in the playoffs, right? [To be] safely in the tournament.

“From that perspective, we got a ways to go.”

The answers to how they make up that difference in the win column won’t be answered over the final 10 days. But it’s a question Counsell and the rest of the Cubs front office will be pondering for the next 6 months before the 2025 season starts up in Japan against the standard in the National League — the Los Angeles Dodgers.

After all, it takes a village, they say.

“That’s right,” Counsell said. “It takes more wins, too.”