ATLANTA -- It may be true that if the Atlanta Braves were in Seattle's division, they'd be about 28 games out of first right now.

	Marcus Giles and the rest of the Braves had good reason to celebrate Tuesday, all but wrapping up the NL East.

It may be true that if the Braves were in any American League division, they'd be about 13 games out in the wild-card race right now.

It may also be true that on most people's lists of Teams Most Likely to Win the World Series, the Braves might be batting somewhere around the No. 7 hole.

But before everybody starts dismissing these latest, not-so-greatest Atlanta Braves as 1995's news, we have this advice:

Uh, not so fast.

Once again Thursday night, these Braves won another one of those Games They Needed to Win. And this was maybe the biggest yet.

This time, they handed the Phillies a 6-2 thumping that all but ended the NL East pennant race -- unless you think that three-game leads with three to play don't mean much anymore.

And Phillies manager Larry Bowa can do that math without a calculator.

"We're on a respirator right now," Bowa said. "It's gonna take a miracle -- on both ends."

So barring miracles -- or at least a very bizarre weekend of baseball -- it's going to be time to mount yet one more pennant in the upper deck of Turner Field. And then the Braves will face that question that has hounded them every October for a decade:

Now what?

They know they're heading for this particular October invitational favored by no one except themselves. But if they're going to do that underdog dance, they'll be dancing as one of the most dangerous underdogs of all time.

"Hey, that's OK with us," said Tom Glavine, one of the few Braves around who can actually remember the last time the Braves were October underdogs. "We don't mind going into this thing as underdogs. Just look at the Yankees last year. They limped in. And the next thing you knew, they were world champions."

"We've been the hunted for so long," said Chipper Jones, "it would be nice to go into a series as the hunter. If we can just go into a series free and easy and relaxed, and play the way we have the last week or so, we'll be fine."

Over that past week or so, the Braves have finally shown signs that they still possess that ability to rise up to those old, Braves-like standards when they need to.

They rose up on an amazing Sunday afternoon at Shea Stadium when they trailed the Mets with two outs in the ninth. They rose up again six days later, on a memorable Saturday afternoon against the Mets, when they were down to their last strike eight different times and still won. Then they rose up yet again these last two nights against the Phillies, after their lead had shriveled to a mere one game again.

"We've been pretty good at winning the games we needed to win," Glavine said. "As much as this team has struggled or underachieved in most people's eyes, one thing we have done is that the games we've won have been big games."

So how big was this one?

Had they lost Thursday, the Braves would have led by just a game again. And that would have meant having to squirm through another uncomfortable weekend against the Marlins, as the Phillies headed to Cincinnati to play the eminently sweepable Reds. Which would have created a whole new series of Games They Needed To Win for the Braves.

You could see that scenario hanging in the night, too, when Braves starter John Burkett promptly fell behind, 1-0, in the top of the first inning. This was your basic ominous development for a team that was 40 games over .500 (59-19) when it scored first and 28 games under (26-54) when the other team scored first.

But this wasn't going to be one of those games that fit that mold. In the bottom of the first, heretofore-unruffled Phillies rookie Brandon Duckworth kicked off the biggest game of his life with a four-pitch walk to leadoff man Marcus Giles. And six pitches later the Chipster was scorching a two-run double up the right-center-field alley for his first RBI not derived from a home run since Sept. 1.

"That was a big hit for this ball club," Jones said. "It might have been a bigger hit for me, just from the standpoint of confidence. I haven't gotten a hit like that in a long, long time."

Until this series, the Braves hadn't scored in the first and second innings of any game since (we kid you not) July 23. But they did it Wednesday against Phillies ace Robert Person.

And Thursday, they put up a three-spot in the first, then scored another run in the second off Duckworth, who was 16-3 between the major leagues and minor leagues this year -- and had given up three earned runs or fewer in 23 of his previous 25 starts.

"I think we're a lot better team when we have the lead early," said Burkett, who broke a four-game losing streak and won in Atlanta for just the second time since July 1. "That's a big key for any team. But I think it's especially true for this one. Everyone knows we've got a good starting rotation. And I think our bullpen is the best in the game -- including the American League. So we can protect a lead."

On this night, the Phillies did draw to within 4-2 and hung close until the seventh inning. But then, with two outs in the seventh, up stepped Brian Jordan to pound yet one more heroic home run into the balmy Georgia night.

This one may not have been as poetic as his three season-saving home runs against the Mets. But it was a two-run bolt over the center-field fence that turned a two-run game into a four-run game -- and turned a pennant race into a hunt for a few new cases of champagne.

"I knew it was important for us to score a couple more runs," said Jordan, who pumped a fist with emotion -- and relief -- when this ball disappeared, "because the Phillies are never going to give up. Those guys keep battling. They've got some really good young players, and they've got some pop. So when that ball cleared the fence, I knew that was the dagger right there."

Well, it may have been the dagger that ended the NL East race. But for this team, the biggest adventures are yet to come.

If you're just judging this Braves team by its numbers, they sure don't make your eyeballs spin: 13th in the league in runs scored, 10th in homers, 10th in steals, 12th in slugging. But when you're talking about a team with this many players who have done nothing but win, they can't be defined by numbers alone.

"We don't have any guys here who hit 50 homers," Chipper Jones said. "We don't have any guys who drive in 150 runs, or score 150, or steal 40 bases. But this team has been built for a long time on starting pitching. And if we get starting pitching, and we get a couple of lucky hits, that's a formula that's worked for us for a long time. So we'll try to stick to the formula and see what happens."

If it doesn't work, there will be a stampede to label this the beginning of the end of the Braves' long and special era. But GM John Schuerholz sees it as merely a sign that it's time to retool.

"When I sat in our box earlier this season, first with (Giants owner) Peter Magowan and later with (Cubs GM) Andy MacPhail," Schuerholz said, "they each pointed out to that string of pennants out there and said, `You realize how remarkable that is -- but sooner or later it has to come to an end.'

"Well, I understand that. But we're going to try to postpone that for as long as we can. We'll be challenged this winter. We have a lot of free agents. We have a lot of young guys who are not where we'd like them to be in terms of matriculation. We have to work a lot of things out. But I don't think that means we can't do it again or that we're backing up the truck. It just means we have challenging decisions ahead."

And down the road there will be other challenges.

The Phillies, for instance, showed the Braves they're a team on the rise if they can hang onto Scott Rolen. And they now have learned the lessons only a first pennant race can teach.

Duckworth learned one of those lessons Thursday night. But while he wasn't wild about learning it the hard way, he had an appreciation for the meaning of the moment.

"I already appreciate it," Duckworth said. "Just being in the spotlight and being part of what's going on here, being able to put a charge into trying to win the National League East, I think we've all learned from it, for sure. Everyone on this club has learned from it."

"Just like Maddux and Glavine and Smoltz went through it once," Bowa said. "You can't talk about experience. You have to go through it."

And these men at the heart of the Atlanta Braves have gone through more of it than anyone they will face in these National League playoffs. Underestimating the meaning of that could be a huge mistake for somebody.

"A lot of guys here are spoiled," Burkett said. "I've been on some bad teams, teams whose seasons were all locked up by this time in the season. But this team has never experienced that. And they don't want to experience that. These guys expect to win, because that's all they've done."

They may not have done it every year in the last week of October. But until -- and if -- somebody finds a way to send them home, anyone who looks at these Atlanta Braves and says, "No way," needs to take one more trip to Turner Field and take one more look at all those pennants in the upper deck.

It wasn't the interior decorators who put them there.

Jayson Stark is a senior writer for ESPN.com.