SARASOTA, Fla — The last time Chris Bassitt walked off a big league mound, his team was nine outs from winning a championship.

Bassitt’s sixth inning in Game 7 of the World Series wasn’t clean — a Tommy Edman sacrifice fly brought Los Angeles one run closer — but his Blue Jays held a 3-2 lead over the defending champion Dodgers. The fans at Toronto’s Rogers Centre were dreaming of their first title since 1993.

Then, in a matter of hours, the dream died.

Less than four months later, Bassitt’s old teammates are in Dunedin, answering questions about getting back to the Fall Classic, about moving on from the worst loss of their lives. Bassitt, meanwhile, is 90 minutes down the road, in a new clubhouse with new teammates who have their own designs of reaching the mountaintop.

Bassitt signed with the Orioles on a one-year, $18.5 million deal because he believes they can.

“No. 1 reason is a chance to win,” he said Saturday, “and not just win a couple games but win a World Series, and I think this team has the ability to do that.”

It took a long, winding offseason to bring Bassitt to Baltimore, but leaving Toronto might have felt inevitable. His move to the bullpen in the postseason and the Blue Jays’ $210 million investment in free agent starter Dylan Cease made a return to Toronto seem less likely. Bassitt said the Orioles made their interest known “pretty much from day one,” but they also made it clear they had other starters in mind.

“The front office, I give them a lot of credit because they were very, very open with me about who they were targeting and where I was at on the list of targets, so to speak,” Bassitt said with a wry smile.

The Orioles began upgrading their rotation with a trade for Shane Baz in December, then a new deal with Zach Eflin nine days later. As more options came off the board — Freddy Peralta traded to the Mets in January, Framber Valdez heading to the Tigers in early February — Bassitt, 36, remained available.

Finally, on Thursday, he and the Orioles came to terms, keeping him in the always competitive American League East.

“I’ll argue till I die that this is the best division in baseball,” he said. “I think the best way to get to the World Series is to get through this division. It’s from top to bottom the hardest division in baseball, in my opinion, and I’m not gonna really run from that.”

Bassitt joins a club that has given him trouble in his 11-year big league career. In 11 starts against the O’s, Bassitt has a 5.10 ERA. He’s allowed 24 runs in just five starts at Camden Yards.

“Glad not to face them anymore, I’ll say that,” he said. “Their lineup has always been one of the best lineups in baseball. So I’m happy to be on the good side of that rather than having to game plan for them and figure out how to get these guys out.”

That lineup has also added Pete Alonso, Bassitt’s teammate with the Mets in 2022.

“I know what he kinda brings to the team,” Bassitt said. “I’m excited for the addition of Pete. One of the big reasons why I came here was Pete.”

“He’s a beauty,” Alonso said of Bassitt on Friday. “Chris is one of my all-time favorites. Big personality. I think that just having that veteran presence is not just good for the pitching staff but good for the whole clubhouse. He brings energy every day. He’s a bulldog out there, and I think he’s gonna be a huge addition for us, not just in the regular season but especially when we make that playoff stretch, that playoff run.”

Bassitt has another friend in the O’s clubhouse: Eflin, whom he met through mutual friend and former reliever Jake Diekman. When Bassitt signed, he texted Eflin: “Let’s go win a title.”

“The whole time I was hoping we got him,” Eflin said. “He’s one of those guys that can truly affect a clubhouse in the best way possible.

“He’s just gonna be a perfect fit here. He brings so much to the culture and the intensity and the competitive side of the game.”

Like Bassitt, Eflin is a righty with a deep arsenal. He’s also pitched in a World Series — 2022 with the Phillies, when he, too, accepted a role as a reliever to help his team.

Though he was signed to start, Bassitt mentioned the possibility of pitching out of the bullpen for Baltimore, something he did well last October. The run he allowed in Game 7 was the only one he gave up in 8 2/3 innings in the postseason.

That doesn’t make the loss easier to swallow

“I’m not over it,” he said. “I think the only way I can possibly get over it is to win one. I don’t think I’ll ever get over that. I still have a lot of pain from it, for sure. So it’s for sure unfinished business. But, yeah, being so close and yet so far away, it sucks.

“But I mean, in baseball or anything really in life, is like the failures teach you everything. So we failed, and a lot of people will say, ‘You didn’t really fail. There wasn’t really a loser in that World Series.’ No, we lost. We failed. We did things the wrong way, and I think the only way to learn and the only way to really get through things is to fail and then it’s like, all right. Some people say injuries and all those things, but if you can just sit back and learn from it, you can be a better person and a better player for it.

“So, to answer your question, I’m not over it.”