CHICAGO — When the National League Division Series moved to Wrigley Field with the Chicago Cubs facing a 2-0 deficit against the Milwaukee Brewers, manager Craig Counsell acknowledged the hole they had dug for themselves.

“No question about it,” Counsell said Tuesday. “And we get to decide how this story ends.”

Sweetheart, get him rewrite.

The Cubs will head back to Milwaukee on Saturday for Game 5 with a brand new script after their 6-0 win Thursday tied the series at 2-2.

“It’s cool that the brightest lights have brought the best out of a lot of our guys,” Nico Hoerner said. “It was a really well-rounded game, and it’s cool that’s how our group responded.”

After the Cubs lost the first two games at American Family Field and looked awful doing so, the pressure is now squarely on the Brewers, a team facing yet another postseason collapse after finishing the regular season with the best record in baseball.

“They’re built to be great, and they played great these two games,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. “Hopefully the tables will turn when we get into Game 5 at our place. But we have to find out how bad we’re going to fight back. We have all season.”

This will be a Game 5 that tests the will of two franchises synonymous with losing the Big One.

The Cubs got the proverbial monkey off their backs with the 2016 World Series title, but haven’t returned since. The Brewers went to a World Series in 1982, lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games and never got back.

Which team will blink first?

“This is like the clock gets a little tighter and we know we don’t have as much time to pick ourselves up, I guess,” Pete Crow-Armstrong said. “At the same time, sorry, I forgot the question. I’m watching the highlights.”

Crow-Armstrong can be forgiven for losing focus with the media while watching highlights of Matt Shaw on TV, as long as he doesn’t lose it when it really matters.

Now it’s on to Milwaukee, where the Cubs need to refocus and forget about the way the series began.

“We get to pack our bags, man,” Counsell said. “That’s all we wanted to do today was pack our bags. We get to pack our bags.”

Seldom has a Cubs manager been as excited about the idea of packing a suitcase. Many were asked to pack before they were ready to go anywhere, including David Ross, the guy Counsell replaced. But Counsell lives near the Brewers’ park, so even if he didn’t pack his bags he’d have some spare clothes at his house.

Brewers fans will get another change to mess around with their favorite punching bag, but the boos that assuredly will cascade down upon Counsell won’t matter if his team manages to pull off a comeback for the ages.

It would no doubt be sweet revenge for the hometown-hero-turned-villain, and another improbable chapter in a fairy-tale season for the Cubs. Or it could be the real end of the story for the Cubs, a team that put its fans in the spin cycle from opening day and has yet to hit the stop button. Thursday was their best postseason game by far, with three home runs, including the third in the series from Michael Busch.

But they also turned in two clunkers in Milwaukee, which can’t be dismissed.

No matter how this series turns out, the only thing for certain was it had to go five games. The two NL Central rivals staged a great regular-season battle, with the Cubs winning seven of the 13 games but blowing a 6 1/2-game lead to the eventual division champs. Both teams held serve in their own ballparks in the NLDS, and now it’s up for grabs.

The script flipped Thursday for starter Matthew Boyd, who failed to get out of the first inning in the Game 1 loss but threw 4 2/3 solid innings to save the Cubs, allowing no runs on two hits.

And it flipped as well for Ian Happ, who entered with two hits in 21 at-bats in the postseason but launched a three-run, first-inning home run off Freddy Peralta that shook the press box and jump-started the crowd of 41,770.

It did a 180-degree turn for Shaw, who entered the night 0 for 12 in his first postseason but reached on an infield hit in the second and delivered a run-scoring single in the sixth.

And finally it flipped madly for Kyle Tucker, whose seventh-inning home run ended a clout-free stretch in which he homered only once since Aug. 23, before a calf injury sidelined him most of September.

That’s how the postseason works. One day you’re the nail, and the next day you’re the hammer.

Whether the Cubs can bring the same kind of intensity to American Family Field without the wall of sound that accompanied their two wins at Wrigley remains to be seen. From the taunting of Peralta with “Freeeeee-dee” chants in the first inning to the collective roar after Caleb Thielbar induced Caleb Durbin to ground out for the final out, it was a night that tested everyone’s eardrums and larynges.

“To look up and the moon is already up, it’s dark out there, and the fans have your back 40 minutes to game time, there’s nothing like that,” Boyd said. “It’s really special.”

Murphy said the raucous atmosphere obviously affected his young team.

“We’ve got a really young team,” he said. “I think everybody knows that. Maybe by far the youngest team in the postseason. That kind of stuff emotionally can affect guys. They can start to play a little too hard. This game is a game of precision, and the Cubs’ experience and what they’ve been through, they were better in this environment for sure.”

The Brewers have been superior in their own environment, rolling out the barrel and rolling over the Cubs in the first two games, knocking out Boyd and Shota Imanaga early. Whether Imanaga will start or pitch in Game 5 is Counsell’s biggest off-day decision.

The usual Cubbie caravan rolling up I-94 was missing in Games 1 and 2, thanks to a lack of available tickets. Brewers fans should be lauded for refusing to scalp their season tickets in the first two games, keeping their park safe from the marauding Cubs fans and their ‘W’ flags.

Will they be as loyal to their team in Game 5 with prices skyrocketing and thousands of North Shore Cubs fans with gas in the tank and money to burn?

“It’s a great atmosphere, a loud ballpark with noise from both fan bases there,” Hoerner said. “Even regular-season games there are pretty loud. Every game of this series has been amazing to be part of.”

So it’s back up I-94, past Great America and the Mars Cheese Castle, zooming by the Haribo gummy factory and the outlet stores and on to the town where beer and water are considered essential life elements.

“It’s right where we want to be,” Crow-Armstrong said. “Nowhere else to go. We had our eyes set on Milwaukee as soon as those two games were done.”

There’s nowhere they’d rather be Saturday night, with a chance to prove their doubters wrong and put a stake in the heart of the Brewers.

The ending has yet to be written, but the Cubs suddenly have the pen in their hands.

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