PHILADELPHIA — Baseball players are the most resilient of all athletic species. It isn’t a choice, of course. You either learn how to adapt to the daily grind, the nightly water flume, the absurd pace of 162 games in 180 days, or it’s best to find another way to make a living.

So it was difficult to distinguish between the Mets’ clubhouse before Friday’s comeback 11-5 throttling of the Phillies and after. Sure: postgame there were more smiles. There were more laughs. But it wasn’t like you were walking into a funeral home, either, just past 4 o’clock in the afternoon, when the losing streak was still six and the abyss ever nearer their toes.

The Cubs-Brewers game played on a couple of TVs. Some players read mail. Noah Syndergaard, two days after absorbing the worst beating of his life, saw a member of the Mets’ traveling media whom he noticed back at the team’s hotel.

“I charged a few meals to your room,” he said. “Now I need your Netflix password.”

Resilience.

“This group especially seems to take everything in stride, good or bad, high or low,” manager Mickey Callaway said. “We have a tall order in front of us,” Callaway said. “But we’ve got to get it done.”

If the Mets didn’t arrive in Philly with their season in tatters, necessarily, it was certainly edging toward a point of no return. All the hard work in sneaking within a half-game of the first wild-card three weeks ago, to within two of the second wild card as recently as a week ago, it all got cut up the prior six games as if shoved through a paper shredder.

The TV brought no relief, either: the Cubs jumped out early on the Brewers at Wrigley Field. The Mets knew they’d gain no ground no matter what they did at Citizens Bank Park this night. If the mood wasn’t grim, or glum, the standings sure were.

“We have to make sure everyone stays in the right place mentally,” Callaway said.

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Despite this sudden plunge back to the emotional depths of early July, the Mets did the right thing by giving their fans — and themselves — the August they gave them. As the season began to slip away this week there were some revisionist historians who revisited the Mets’ trade-deadline decisions not to punt the season.

It’s a fair opinion. But it also fails to account for two things:

1. The Mets weren’t going to gain an epic haul dangling the players they were willing to dangle.

2. There is genuine value to the games the Mets have played in August.

For a few weeks, a frantic mania returned to Citi Field for the first time in three years. The three games with the Nats earlier this month were as loud and as boisterous as regular-season games have ever been there. There is value in seeing what an engaged fan base is capable of — and worth toward feeling the depression that covered so much of 0-for-3 against the Braves and 0-for-3 against the Cubs.

But of even more value is this: the vital core of Mets have experience what it is to participate in playoff-caliber baseball. Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom and Steven Matz all experienced that in ’15 and ’16. So did Michael Conforto. But this was brand new for Pete Alonso and Jeff McNeil, for Amed Rosario and J.D. Davis.

And even Friday, as the Mets scored all 11 runs the last three innings to erase a 1-0 deficit, there was value to being part of this, to seeing veterans like Wilson Ramos and Todd Frazier rise to the occasion in huge spots, to shutting up the home crowd and giving the ever-present Mets contingent something to crow about for the first time in a week.

(Of course, pregame, I’d tweeted this: “Someday, if I make it to an old enough age and achieve a certain level of innate wisdom, I hope to understand why Mickey Callaway (or Brodie Van Wagenen) is so addicted to writing the words “Todd Frazier” on a lineup card. #Mets” There was, in that moment, a 191.5% chance he would hit two home runs and drive in a career-high six runs across the next three hours.)

“The more practice they get playing games like this,” Callaway said of his kid players, “the better prepared they’ll be down the road.”

There are 28 games left and they are five games short, and that’s a lot of acreage to make up. But even if they fall shy, the core Mets will be better for having played these games, having survived this grind, having wobbled weak-kneed, off this Cyclone ride. The last month of high-leverage games wasn’t wasted. Anything but.

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