NEW YORK — The Los Angeles Dodgers plan for everything, but even they could not plan for this.

When Game 5 of the World Series began Wednesday night, none of their game plans or pitching scenarios or wildest dreams included finding themselves three outs from a championship a few hours later. If there is anything they have learned from being in every postseason for the past decade, it is that every October offers a surprise.

So it was not until the seventh inning Wednesday that starter Walker Buehler declared himself available to pitch, three days before he was supposed to start a potential Game 7. Dodgers Manager Dave Roberts pushed Blake Treinen as far as he could go to hold a one-run lead through the eighth. He had already used five other relievers just to get them to that point. So Buehler headed to the bullpen and started throwing.

After all those summer days saying goodbye to injured starting pitchers, after all those October nights spent relying on their relievers, even the minds that designed this Dodgers juggernaut could not have predicted they would need a starter, Buehler, to record the final three outs against the New York Yankees in a 7-6 win that clinched their World Series title, four games to one.

“That’s the beauty of October baseball. You don’t know what’s going to do it,” said Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations. “You want to be as talented as you can possibly be, have as much depth as you can possibly have, because you don’t know what life form these games are going to take on, and you want to be as prepared as you possibly can.”

It will be impossible to remember the eighth World Series title in Dodgers history without acknowledging that the Dodgers can plan – and pay – for contingencies better than any franchise in the sport. They spent more than $1 billion this offseason alone, for goodness’ sake, adding to a roster that wasn’t exactly wanting.

But even this team, with Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, with endless player development resources and enough injured pitchers to start an expansion club, had to exhaust all possible options to raise the trophy it needed to cement its legacy.

Until this year, the story around Friedman and Roberts and Buehler and the rest was that they had won just one title, in 2020, after a pandemic-shortened regular season. Try as they might, they could never quite convince the baseball world that World Series should count the same as any other. This one, they say, should toss the narrative that the Dodgers are just a regular season winner out the window.

“It’s hard to win a championship regardless of what your team is like. It’s hard, and there’s a reason why there hasn’t been a repeat champion since the Yankees did it (in 1998-2000). It clearly speaks to the difficulty, the playoff format, all that stuff,” Roberts said. “… I’m sure there’s no asterisk on this one.”

As defenestrations go, this one was emphatic, punctuated by their comeback win in a Game 5 so magically nauseating it will take years to fully process.

They trailed by five in the fifth inning against the reigning American League Cy Young Award winner, Gerrit Cole, came back after the Yankees temporarily melted down, and fell behind again. They tied the game in the eighth inning on a Gavin Lux sacrifice fly. They took the lead two batters later when Betts hit another.

In between those fly balls, Ohtani reached on catcher’s interference, the most important contact he made while going 1 for 11 in three games since injuring his left shoulder sliding into second base in Game 2. Several champagne-soaked Dodgers indicated late Wednesday that Ohtani’s shoulder was much worse than the superstar let on. Roberts said “he was playing with one arm.”

The Dodgers did not sign Ohtani to be a decoy, but with their season on the line, that is effectively what he was. And even as that injury derailed Ohtani’s productivity plans this week, he did not wait long before he started making more.

“Seeing him tonight celebrating, he said, ‘All right, nine more!’ ” said Friedman, who was in less of a hurry. “Once we sober up, we’ll focus on trying to do it again.”

When they look back, they will see painful lessons learned and fixes well-applied: The Dodgers entered the postseason short on pitching but determined to make it work. They were consciously more aggressive at the plate, and in general, than they had been in the years when they did not get this far.

They nearly exited in the first round anyway, falling behind 2-1 to the San Diego Padres in a National League Division Series before climbing back to win it. That series so tested the Dodgers and their composure that when it ended, one of those injured starting pitchers, Clayton Kershaw, felt their destiny was sealed.

“He came over to me and said, ‘We’re going to the World Series,’ ” owner Mark Walter remembered. And so they did.

What Kershaw saw in that San Diego series is the urgency that allowed the Dodgers to largely dominate a National League Championship Series against the New York Mets that went six games but might as well have gone four, then take a 3-0 lead over the American League champion Yankees with relative ease. These Dodgers, winners of four pennants in the past eight seasons, know better than anyone what doesn’t work in October. Maybe, just maybe, they are starting to figure out what does.

“This is my 10th year here, and I feel like every single postseason has been different as far as what’s played, who’s been successful, what’s been successful for us, what have we failed at,” bench coach and game-planning guru Danny Lehmann said. “So it’s this constant back and forth of getting all the value you have out of that specific team that year.”

Getting the most out of this year’s roster, over the past few weeks, meant finding ways to work around major injuries to big stars.

Freeman, of course, played his way into legend while hardly able to walk in the first two rounds. When he got a few days off, though not the prescribed four-to-six weeks the sprained ankle he suffered in September would normally require, he used the time to adjust. Five games later, he had become the first player in World Series history to homer in each of the first four games of a Fall Classic, tied a 64-year-old record for most RBI in a single World Series with 12, and won the World Series MVP award.

“It seems like we hit every speed bump possible over the course of this year,” said Freeman, who also dealt with a previously unreported injury to his side. “And to overcome what we did as a group of guys, it’s special. This is what we start out to do every single spring training is to win a championship. I think it’s the hardest thing to do in sports because you just never know what’s going to happen.”

This was not the roster the Dodgers envisioned having in the World Series when spring training began. Hobbled stars aside, their lineup is intact. Their starting rotation was not, down Kershaw, Tyler Glasnow, Dustin May and many others who might have found themselves here instead.

“There was a lot of back filling on talent because of injury, a lot of young players cut their teeth, which is good,” Roberts said. “But one thing is that we just kept going.”

No one kept going quite like Dodgers relievers, who at times this postseason were so good that they were actually Los Angeles’s best starter. Roberts turned to that bullpen again early Wednesday, after starter Jack Flaherty recorded only four outs and surrendered four runs to the Yankees, including Aaron Judge’s first career World Series homer in the first inning.

At that point, Roberts was taking the opposite approach to the one he used in Game 4, when he planned to use all relievers but pivoted to worse ones when the Yankees took a lead. Wednesday, Roberts made a different bet, turning to his best arms to try to keep the Yankees reasonably close and give his team a chance to chase them down. The 2024 Dodgers and big bets were not always copacetic. But this one paid off, aided by unthinkable Yankees sloppiness that keyed a game-tying five-run Dodgers comeback in the fifth, when New York made two errors and a mental mistake when Cole failed to cover first base on a grounder that would have ended the inning without any runs scoring.

Even then, the plans didn’t hold. The Yankees took the lead again in the sixth and did not need a pitcher other than Cole until the seventh. Lux and Betts delivered the tying and go-ahead runs in the eighth. Treinen pushed himself to 42 pitches and a third inning of work to get the game to the ninth. And then came Buehler, a year removed from Tommy John surgery and still searching for the stuff he had before, in the biggest inning of his life. He worked a 1-2-3.

“He’s a big-game pitcher,” Treinen said. “I’ll say it over and over again: He’s had his struggles this year. But I’ve never seen anyone pitch in bigger moments.”

Buehler, who also pitched five scoreless innings in his sparkling Game 3 start, will be a free agent after this season. Treinen and several other key relievers will be free to sign elsewhere, too. The Dodgers will have ample funds to sign new ones, to bring in more stars, to reimagine their roster for another championship run. But this franchise knows better than anyone that whatever Friedman and his crew dream up, October will have something else in mind.