DETROIT – After a while – after three decades, let’s say – teams get tired of hearing about their ancestors. The old guys earned their glory, but the subtext is clear: they did something amazing, and you have not.

Dan Wilson, the nice-guy manager of the Seattle Mariners, was too polite to dismiss the main theme of his news conference before Game 4 of this American League Division Series on Wednesday. This, he was reminded, was the 30th anniversary of the franchise’s signature moment, when Edgar Martínez doubled home Ken Griffey Jr. to win the ALDS.

“I think I started towards home and peeled off and went towards second,” said Wilson, the Mariners’ catcher in 1995. “I don’t even really remember. I think I lost my mind at that point.”

This felt like a good day for the Mariners to lose their minds again. To clinch another trip to the AL Championship Series exactly 30 years after their first? Only the true believers could expect such blissful symmetry. Realists knew better.

The Mariners don’t do easy narratives. If they did, they wouldn’t be the only team to never win a pennant. If they did, they wouldn’t have left the job half-done in Game 4 of this ALDS at Comerica Park on Wednesday. They would have finished off the Detroit Tigers.

Instead, they turned a three-run lead into a blowout loss, 9-3, setting up a decisive fifth game in Seattle on Friday against Tarik Skubal, the most dominant pitcher in the sport.

“We’ve got a lot of resiliency in this club and I have confidence in the guys that we’re going to go out and play good baseball,” said catcher Cal Raleigh, who is 7 for 16 (.438) in this series. “It’s going to be tough, but we’re up for the challenge and that’s what you do at this time. You face good pitching, you face good teams.”

Seattle was good enough to win Game 2 last Sunday, when Jorge Polanco homered twice off Skubal and the Mariners rallied off Detroit’s bullpen. They also beat Skubal twice in the regular season, and will not be intimidated by the reigning AL Cy Young Award winner. But they should have avoided a rematch.

Starter Bryce Miller took a 3-0 lead into the bottom of the fifth inning on Wednesday. That was all the Mariners really wanted from Miller, who had a 5.68 ERA with one quality start in 18 tries this season. So after a single, a fielder’s choice and a hard-hit double by Dillon Dingler, Wilson went to the bullpen.

That’s how teams do it in the postseason, but for starters, it’s hard to accept.

“Regular season, I think I go six, seven innings there and we’re in a good spot,” Miller said, adding that he still felt strong.

“I think I had 55 pitches,” Miller said, accurately. “There’s a leadoff single that was a weak-contact floater over second base. And then we get the ground ball, we’re not able to turn two. I think that was also a splitter that (was) just hit too slow. And then, yeah, I fell behind and they got a ball in the gap. But everything still felt really good and sharp.”

Then again, Miller acknowledged it was his first playoff start. He was in no position to argue with Wilson, he said, and the bullpen had been very good.

Lefty Gabe Speier, especially, had been all but untouchable for a month. Since Sept. 6, the day the Mariners began a 17-1 run that settled the AL West, Speier had an 0.75 ERA, allowing one run in 12 innings, with 15 strikeouts and no walks.

On this day, though, it wasn’t Randy Johnson marching out of the Mariners’ bullpen, as he did on that blessed Sunday in 1995. It was Bobby Ayala, Arthur Rhodes and every other haunted Mariners reliever of playoffs past. They had come to crash the party.

Speier and the righties who followed – Eduard Bazardo and Carlos Vargas – faced 18 batters from the fifth to the eighth innings. They served up two singles, three homers and four doubles, plus two walks, a wild pitch and a stolen base.

It was loud. It was emphatic. And maybe it showed that the Tigers have gotten too familiar with the Mariners’ relievers. Bazardo has pitched in all four games, Speier in three.

“Maybe a little bit,” Speier said. “I think more so today, it just came down to execution. I don’t think I made great pitches, and they got ’em.”

Wilson said he was not concerned with overexposing his relievers – “I don’t think that’s a risk,” he said – and that Speier was equally effective against righties and lefties. But Raleigh conceded that familiarity was a factor.

“I mean, yeah – but it goes both ways,” Raleigh said. “They’ve been throwing the ball good all year. I have confidence they’ll bounce back on Friday.”

The Mariners will have two rested starters, George Kirby and Luis Castillo, to use against the Tigers in Game 5; those pitchers combined for 9 ⅔ innings in the first two games, allowing only two runs. Another starter, Logan Gilbert, looked dominant for six innings in Game 3 and will have two days’ rest.

Wilson does not reveal much about his plans, but it stands to reason that Kirby and Castillo will both be in play on Friday. As for Gilbert, while Wilson’s 1995 memories may be hazy, he surely recalls Johnson’s cameo – on one day of rest – at the end of the fateful Game 5.

“These guys have done this all season long, where they get in tough situations and they know exactly what to do,” Wilson said. “They do fight back and they do bounce back, and I’m not worried about that at all. No better place to do that than at home.”

The Mariners have clinched all three of their ALCS berths at home – with Griffey in 1995, with Alex Rodriguez in 2000 and with Ichiro Suzuki in 2001. Raleigh’s Mariners should have secured their own by now. But they have earned one more chance.

“It’s not going to be easy,” Raleigh said. “You’re not just going to roll teams like that. It’s not usually how it goes.”

Especially not for the Mariners.