PHILADELPHIA — Welcome to October chaos.

With a dominant effort from Blake Snell, one perfectly executed — if rarely used and never practiced — wheel play, and one fortuitous scoop from Freddie Freeman for the game’s final out, the Los Angeles Dodgers escaped with a tense, thrilling 4-3 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies on Monday night to go up 2 games to 0 in their National League Division Series.

“I’ll take off my Dodgers hat and just put on a fan hat,” Mookie Betts said. “I think that was a really, really dope baseball game. I think both of these games were really, really dope baseball games, fun to be a part of. Obviously, it’s a lot better when you’re on the winning side, but you can’t ask for better postseason baseball. It’s just fun. This is why we play.”

It was two games in one. The first six innings was a classic pitcher’s duel between Snell and Phillies starter Jesus Luzardo as the game went scoreless into the seventh inning. The final three innings were a wild affair of hits, walks, tag plays at home plate and on the bases, second guessing of managers and a nearly costly throw in the dirt from Tommy Edman with the tying run on third base that Freeman saved to close it out.

The key play of the game, however, came earlier in the bottom of the ninth, after the Phillies had scored two runs on Nick Castellanos’ half-swing bloop double to shallow left field to make it 4-3 with nobody out — with Castellanos somehow avoiding a tag at second base from Edman, a call confirmed upon replay review. With Alex Vesia entering to face Bryson Stott and the Dodgers expecting a bunt, the Dodgers huddled up and called for the wheel play — when the third baseman charges hard with the shortstop sprinting to cover third base, a play third baseman Max Muncy said the Dodgers don’t even practice in spring training.

“Immediately, Mookie was like, ‘Hey, we need to be doing this,'” Muncy said. “It speaks to his baseball IQ and his intuition in that situation. We were all thinking it, but Mookie was definitely the one that brought it up and said we need to do this.”

Betts, who just finished his full season at shortstop, explained his thinking. “It’s just another learned behavior,” he said. “I’ve got to give that credit to Miggy Rojas. I think we did it earlier in the year in Anaheim, and I remember asking him, ‘When’s a good time to do it?’ He said, ‘In a do-or-die situation,’ and he and Woody (Dodgers coach Chris Woodward) have really helped me a lot just learning situations.”

Manager Dave Roberts gave the go-ahead. If the Dodgers failed, it would put runners on first and third with nobody out.

“I think it just speaks to the experience that a lot of us have been in a lot of these big games before and we have a lot of experience doing these types of things,” Muncy said. “Doc trusts us as much as we trust Doc and it’s not an easy thing to gain, and so that’s why in that moment, Doc heard us talking and right away he was on board with it.”

The first pitch to Stott was a slider out of the zone. In a sacrifice situation, the batter’s job with a runner on second is to push the ball down the third-base line. With Muncy charging and Betts hustling to third, they were worried they might have blown their cover.

“When it comes to the wheel play as a third baseman, your first job it obviously to field the ball, and then you’ve got to make a good throw,” Muncy said. “But the one thing no one talks about is you got to make sure the guy’s there to catch the throw.”

Betts got there.

“God blessed me with some athleticism, so I was able to just kind of put in on display there,” Betts said.

“It’s tag play, too,” Woodward explained. “Running the wheel on a force out is a lot easier because the third baseman just has to catch it. But if you have a tag him, it presents a more difficult play. For Muncy to field it, know right away, make a good throw. Mookie hung in there. That was the play of the game.”

Get this: The Dodgers didn’t have a 5-6 putout all season, the only team in the majors without one, according to ESPN Research.

In an era with few sacrifice bunts, the attempt itself was debatable strategy. Indeed, the Phillies had just 16 sacrifice bunts all season. Manager Rob Thomson explained the decision: “Just left on left,” he said, referring to Stott against Vesia. “Trying to tie the score. I liked where our bullpen was at, compared to theirs. We play for the tie at home.”

He praised the Dodgers’ execution.

“Mookie did a great job of disguising the wheel play. We teach our guys that if you see wheel, just pull it back and slash because you’ve got all kinds of room in the middle. But Mookie broke so late that it was tough for Stotty to pick it up.”

The game was hardly over as the Phillies eventually put runners on second and third with two outs. Roberts finally went to Roki Sasaki, who he had been hoping to avoid using for the second time in three days given Sasaki’s limited usage the final month. Indeed, Monday was one month from when Sasaki threw off a mound in Arizona, overhauling his delivery since being out early in the season.

Sasaki threw one pitch and got Trea Turner to hit a routine grounder to second — which Edman nearly threw away. For the first two-thirds of the game, it was all Snell and Luzardo looking completely unhittable, the first time two left-handers had locked up in a scoreless playoff game since 2011, when Cole Hamels of the Phillies and Jaime Garcia of the Cardinals did it in the NLDS.

Luzardo had allowed just one hit and had fired off 20 fastballs at 97-plus mph. Snell didn’t allow a hit until the fifth inning. He got his biggest outs in the bottom of sixth. After walking Turner and Kyle Schwarber with one out, he faced Bryce Harper, throwing him five sliders in a six-pitch battle, finally whiffing Harper on a 2-2 slider.

“I needed weak contact,” Snell said. “I knew I was going to have to attack him somewhere where he could hit, but I felt confident with the slider. Like today, I felt really confident with that pitch. Just kind of rode it out against him in that at-bat and ended up winning.”

He then got Alec Bohm to ground out to third base, with Miguel Rojas diving to tag the base just ahead of the speedy Turner.

Snell, the two-time Cy Young winner the Dodgers signed for $182 million in the offseason, had made 10 postseason starts before this season and never made it through six innings. He’s now done it twice, having pitched seven innings in the Dodgers’ wild-card opener against the Reds.

Now the Dodgers are one win away from the NLCS, heading back to Dodger Stadium. The Phillies’ top three hitters — Turner, Schwarber and Harper — are a combined 2-for-21.

“Huge, huge momentum maintainers,” Roberts said. “Great ballgame, great plays, huge win.”