SharePoint 2013 Search Service offline "The remote server returned an error: (503) Server Unavailable"

After some significant maintenance on our on-premise SharePoint farm after a failed cumulative update, our search service would not come back online. All the services pretty much needed to have their services restarted after restoring the front-end and SQL server from a pre-update virtual machine snapshot.

 I will save you the gory details of all the things that were tried. No solutions offered by numerous blogs and technical articles helped. All the application pools were online, the search service was online according to the PowerShell commands



Here is how I brought this back in our case:
  1. Started all services, as appropriate for each web/app/search server
  2. Search Service Application System Status in Central Admin showed an Administrative Status of "The remote server returned an error: (503) Server Unavailable"
  3. After trying all kinds of fruitless endeavors, I ended up using these PowerShell commands to get everything back online
 

$SSA = Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication



Resume-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication $SSA

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