Even if the interview went terribly yesterday, Cheryl got the job

Question

Even if the interview went terribly yesterday, Cheryl got the job.

You have not talked to Cheryl since her interview. You imagine that the interview went terribly, but you think she probably got the job anyway.(original explanation)

I was studying "even if", I came across this sentence.Even though I am able to understand what "even if" implies and connotes, I still have a problem with its usage that for me the sentence should have written

Even if the interview went terribly yesterday, Cheryl would get the job. ( my sentence)

Because if we use "got", it reduces the meaning of imaginary which the sentence have to have.

Answer 1

"got" in this case is used as a sort of retrospective statement of certainty. It means "must [surely] have gotten". In that sense, it's basically the other side of "would get": one is phrased from a pre-interview perspective*, and the other from a post-interview perspective.

However the sentence is phrased, though, it is an assurance that Cheryl's success in getting the job was essentially guaranteed even in the worst case imaginable; "got" vs "would get" vs "must have gotten" is mostly just a matter of how clear you want to be at the expense of being brief.

_{*But note that the rest of the sentence is, in any case, in the past tense. This leads to a clash between implied tenses that is a little jarring.}

Answer 2

I think you used the conditional structure correctly, technically. But is there really a condition for a certain event? There is the word if in this sentence that is confusing me and it makes you use conditionals. Just like we learned in school :D

But when I think more about it, this is actually the opposite of a real condition since it doesn't matter what happens. Even if [whatever] she got the job. So maybe there are some phrases containing "if" without calling for a conditional?

("Because if we use "got", it will(?) reduces the meaning of imaginary which the sentence have to have.")