CHICAGO -- It was about a half-hour after the final pitch had been thrown. A half-hour after young Stephen Piscotty, the best thing these St. Louis Cardinals had going over the past five days, waved three straight times at the same pitch.

Inside the cramped visitors' clubhouse, the noises of loss permeated: the dappling of water falling from showerheads onto shower floors. The hissing of aerosol deodorant escaping into the humid air. The murmur of grown men explaining to an army of cameras and voice recorders exactly where it all went wrong.

After a win, you never notice these sounds, because the thumping bass of celebratory music echoing off the clubhouse walls drowns them out. Even after some losses the bass still thumps, like it did on Saturday night in St. Louis. But not this time.

Fresh off his postgame news conference, manager Mike Matheny, still wearing his game uniform -– red tennis shoes, gray road pants, red Cardinals pullover and cap, impossibly square chin -– circulated around the clubhouse, offering earnest exchanges.

A handshake for pitching coach Derek Lilliquist. A firm squeeze of the shoulder for bullpen coach Blaise Isley. A hug for Ben Bultmann, the assistant video coordinator. A combination of all three for third baseman Matt Carpenter.

“As I sit here tonight,” said general manager John Mozeliak, off to the side of the clubhouse while his players buttoned their shirt cuffs and donned their slacks and ties, their jackets and dark leather shoes, “I think my takeaway from 2015 is, it was a hundred-win season, it was a year that was defined by a lot of injuries, and yet this club faced that adversity and found ways to have success.”

Ah yes, the injuries. Every team has them, but nobody will publicly acknowledge them. At least not during the season. But when it’s all said and done, when the smell of the other team’s cigar smoke is wafting off the field, down the dugout, through the tunnel and right up in front of your locker, that’s when it’s finally OK to acknowledge the gargantuan pachyderm in the clubhouse.

“I mean, we were banged up most of the year,” said Adam Wainwright, the Opening Day starter who ruptured his Achilles in late April yet somehow managed to return to the field before the end of the season. “Big players. Our first baseman -– cleanup hitter -– out for most of the year. Our No. 3 hitter was out for a lot of the year. I was out for a lot of the year. Our two setup guys were out for most of the year.”

Mind you, that was just a partial listing. According to the website ManGamesLost.com, the Cardinals were the team most affected by injuries to key players, and it wasn’t even close. But in the interest of time (and dignity), Wainwright kept it short and sweet. He didn’t bother to reference Randal Grichuk’s elbow. Or Carlos Martinez’s shoulder. Or Yadier Molina’s thumb. Instead, he stopped himself and focused on the positive.

“We still overcame all that.”

Well, kind of.

That the Cardinals still managed to win 100 games is borderline preposterous and speaks to (A) the job done by Matheny, who should have "CSI: St. Louis" on speed dial in the event that he’s robbed of manager of the year honors and (B) the quality of young players like Grichuk, Piscotty and Tommy Pham, rookies who might not might have gotten as much ink as the Cubs’ cubs, but who were instrumental in keeping their team atop baseball’s best division all season long.

Unfortunately for the Cardinals, by the time October rolled around, all the attrition had finally caught up with them. By the time the curtains opened on the 2015 playoffs, St. Louis –- without Martinez and Jordan Walden, and with only a fraction of Wainwright, Molina and Matt Holliday -– was running on fumes.

From the beginning of September on, the Cards lost more games than they won. Meanwhile, the Cubs were busy developing a severe allergy to losing. Over the final 34 days of the regular season, Chicago won eight more games than St. Louis, including four of the six that the two teams played.

So really, what transpired over the past five days was simply an extension of the previous five weeks. All the mashing of home runs by the Cubs' young hitters. All the posturing that the Cardinals' pitching staff was just fine, thank you very much. It was a resounding affirmation that, while St. Louis might have been the best team in baseball for much of the season, by the time the leaves started falling, they weren’t even the best team in their own division.

“We played with what we had, and we played to the best of our ability,” Carpenter said following the 6-4 loss in Game 4 that was punctuated by Cubs rookie Kyle Schwarber clobbering a Kevin Siegrist fastball clear over the right-field scoreboard and halfway to Lake Michigan. “We had a tremendous year, we just fell a little short. They’re a good team. The difference in this series was they swung the bats better than we did. We just couldn’t keep them from scoring.”

As a result, for the first time in five years the Cardinals will be watching the National League Championship Series from somewhere other than a dugout.

It was such an odd sensation that Wainwright, one of the game’s more thoughtful and articulate talkers, had trouble processing it.

“It still feels like we left so much on the table. We lost in the World Series in ’13, in the LCS last year and, when you lose that late, it’s almost worse. It’s almost worse.”

He lingered on the theme of "almost" for a moment, unable to accurately gauge just how acute the pain of his team’s 30-minute-old failure was. How it compared to eliminations past.

“It’s almost worse. I say 'almost' because you’re still losing, but when we lost in 2013, it was almost like, gosh, I wish we hadn’t even gotten here because this is so painful. But at the same time, we have a team [this year] to go deep into the playoffs, to win a World Series with our pitching and our hitters. We just didn’t get the job done.”

With that, his voice trailed off. As the muffled sounds of thumping bass –- outside, the Cubs and 42,411 of their closest friends were celebrating to “Best Day of My Life” -– carried from the field, down into the dugout, through the tunnel and up into the visitors' clubhouse, Wainwright turned back toward his locker and methodically donned his travel finest.