Chicago hasn't had a night like this in a while. The Cubs punched their ticket to October and watched a 24-year-old center fielder do something only six men in baseball history had ever done, all in the same trip around the bases at Wrigley Field.

Pete Crow-Armstrong stole second base in the first inning of Thursday's series finale against the Miami Marlins, and with that single swipe he became the seventh player in Major League Baseball history to record 40 home runs and 40 stolen bases in one season, and the first Chicago Cub ever to do it. The company he now keeps: Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Alfonso Soriano, Ronald Acuna Jr. and Shohei Ohtani, who reached a 50-50 season in 2023.

Crow-Armstrong is now hitting .280/.374/.577 with 45 home runs, 40 stolen bases, 107 RBI and 119 runs scored, and he leads all of baseball in runs, homers and total bases while pacing the National League in slugging and OPS. It has him squarely in the conversation for NL MVP on a team that opened the year picked to finish in the middle of the pack.

A franchise-defining night

The milestone landed in the middle of a game the Cubs needed to win. Seiya Suzuki's solo home run tied the score in the fifth inning, and an inning later Ian Happ's leadoff triple set up a go-ahead RBI single from Nico Hoerner that held up in a 2-1 final. The victory clinched a National League wild-card berth for Chicago, its second straight postseason trip after ending a long drought a year ago, with the exact wild-card seeding still to be sorted out over the season's final days.

"Everything Pete has done this year has been really incredible. I've never seen it before, actually," Cubs manager Craig Counsell said.

Cubs president Jed Hoyer was similarly blunt about the rarity of what he'd just watched, calling the shortlist of 40-40 players "pretty amazing" and noting how few players in the sport's history have ever been in position to even attempt it. Crow-Armstrong himself downplayed the milestone in the moment, saying his focus on the basepath was simply advancing the count for his team, not chasing a number.

The wild-card round begins Tuesday, and the Cubs will spend the next few days watching the standings settle while Crow-Armstrong's name gets stitched into a record book most lifelong Cubs fans have had to look up. The clinch also gave Chicago a rare same-day sweep across town, with the White Sox securing their own American League postseason berth hours earlier — a separate recap of how Chicago's win and Crow-Armstrong's milestone came together lays out the clinching game inning by inning.

For a franchise that hasn't won a World Series since 2016, the arrival of a 40-40 talent in his age-24 season is the kind of story that reshapes how a team thinks about the next several years, not just the next three weeks.