Will a dream Dodgers win set up another nightmare scenario for the Braves?

LOS ANGELES — When the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ Chris Taylor hit his third homer of the game in the seventh inning, Atlanta Braves manager Brian Snitker sat in his dugout chair and stared, unblinking, at some random spot in the Dodger Stadium outfield. What was taking place in front of him, and his reaction to it, seemed to comprise unrelated elements. His face bore no detectable expression, and his body seemed to drift into torpor, as if by fixing his gaze and remaining stock-still he could convince himself none of this was happening. Or, if that failed, at least that it was happening to someone else.

Here come the questions. Here come the doubts. Here, improbably, come the Dodgers.

There will be a Game 6 of the National League Championship Series, and the way it felt after the Dodgers’ 11-2 win, there probably will be a Game 7. These things seem to happen that way — who knows why? — and now that the Dodgers have won seven straight elimination games over the past two postseasons, it’s justified to wonder if they set up these worst-case scenarios just so they can get out of them.

“I mean, we definitely don’t prefer elimination games,” said outfielder AJ Pollock, who hit two homers to help set up at least one more. “We want to eliminate other teams.”

All of it feels kind of dumb, frankly, which is one of the thoughts that might have been running through Snitker’s mind as he watched from the dugout a man who had been hitting .111 since Aug. 27 hit his third home run of the game. Dumb that this series is heading back to Atlanta after the Dodgers spent the better part of four games playing like amateurs, dumb that the Braves couldn’t even put up a fight in Game 5 with the Dodgers’ pitching staff down to beaks and claws and fully rested ace Max Fried pitching for Atlanta, and especially dumb that the Dodgers’ hitters — terrible all series — lost Justin Turner to injury in Game 4 and then came out of their shoes the next night to get 17 hits, five of them homers.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “I’m happy it happened tonight. … I means, it’s … it’s baseball. Honestly, I’m happy to just give you guys a series. I expected our guys to fight and scratch and claw, and I thought we did that.”

The Braves were here last year, up three games to one in the NLCS before losing three straight to end their season. Grand failure is so woven into the double helix of Atlanta sports history that one Atlanta reporter even threaded a “28-3” reference into a postgame question to Freddie Freeman.

“That’s going to be the narrative,” Freeman said with an air of resignation but not defeat. “It’s been brought up the last couple of days, so I don’t think we have a choice until we kill that narrative. We’re up 3-2 going home. That’s a great position to be in. I think we’re going to be just fine.”

After the game, Roberts and a parade of Dodgers players took turns auditioning descriptions of Taylor’s uniquely quirky personality. They all commended his ability to simultaneously play baseball and shift his brain into neutral — “He’s just in the moment,” was the way Roberts put it — and Pollock broke the…