You want to see that reliever with the 100 mph fastball who’s coming back from elbow surgery and the vet who once won an ERA title and looks like he’s reinvented himself at 34. How about that flashy five-tool rookie in center field and the golden teenager of last season who may be even better this year?

More pundits pick this team to win the tough National League East than any other team. Several say they’ll go to the World Series. A couple even think the Nats will win it all.

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Then the season starts and in less than a week, with a grotesque 2-3 start that feels like 2-13, it’s all gone to the devil. Already, there is no hope — seriously, all is lost. You’re a fan and you just know.

The star shortstop, Trea Turner, one game after he hit a pair of homers, including a walk-off, breaks a finger. He’s out for many weeks. The bullpen is shorthanded at best or just a trash heap waiting to ignite with 20 earned runs allowed in 15 innings. Trevor Rosenthal faces seven men; all seven score. “I’m going to get the ball authenticated when I get my first out,” he says sardonically.

After a spring training of brave talk about improved fundamentals, the team can’t execute anything. Passed balls by the new catcher, pop-ups that drop between players who have never been teammates before, botched grounders by that new Gold Glover, pathetic situational hitting and runners already picked off first, second and third base. If there were a fourth base, they’d find a way to get picked off that.

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Then, on Tuesday night, just the fourth game of the season, Bryce Harper comes back to town and holds a news conference, drooling over the wonders of all things Philly while looking like a coal miner dressed by Versace: a “positive VIBES” cap, a distressed, ripped baby-blue jacket over an I’m-so-cool T-shirt with a gold chain, all of it designed to look old and hip, but all of it brand-new phony.

After getting booed worse than the reincarnation of John Wilkes Booth, Harper torches Nats Park with a single, double and a 458-foot home run, complete with a total-insult bat flip directly at the Nats dugout. Then he reaches base five times Wednesday.

Through all this, poor in-over-his-head Manager Dave Martinez, the bouncy Poobah of Positivity, has that glazed look he trademarked in last’s year lousy showing. He’s Matt Williams — but with batteries included. In the managerial firing pool in your office, not one person picks a date after Memorial Day.

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So, that’s it. Let’s call it a season. This is how baseball treats those who love it.

Asked what he made of this steaming mess, Max Scherzer, the ultimate competitor and the best baseball player in Washington since Walter Johnson retired in 1927, said before Wednesday’s win, “We’re 1-3. Keep grinding. That’s what makes the 162 so much fun. The pulse on the field doesn’t change the pulse in the clubhouse.”

What fans think, and how they react, even the way that you play and the indignities you endure, can’t matter at all. Whatever happens, the pulse in the clubhouse can never change or baseball will eat you alive and leave the carcass.

That’s when I remembered why I respect baseball, and most ballplayers, so much. The game is just so relentlessly crushing for long periods of time, so unfair and demoralizing, such a constant invitation to indulge your weakest character traits and feed into the universal human desire to be a gutless tail-tucked dog.

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When I got home at 1:45 a.m. Wednesday morning after the Brycecapades, I thought, “They have another game in 11 hours — against Aaron Nola, who almost won the Cy Young Award.”

So, what happened? Nothing that you could expect, or almost believe. The Nats knocked out Nola in three innings, scoring two more runs (six) than he allowed in any game last season. Anthony Rendon, Ryan Zimmerman and Juan Soto all homered for a 6-2 lead. But the bullpen imploded again, helping Philly to an 8-6 lead.

However, the Nats got two runs in the eighth, tying the score on a gift missed catch by the first baseman for what should have been the third out. In the ninth, the Phils’ new free agent reliever David Robertson allowed a single, then walked Soto, Zimmerman and, finally the Nats’ 25th man, Jake Noll, one of the least likely rookies to make any team this season, to force home the winning run.

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Pulse? Pulse in that clubhouse?

They say you can’t stick in the big leagues if you can’t hit the real good fastball — the serious heat weeds ’em out, either by lack of talent or just fear.

But you also can’t stick, and you certainly can’t win, unless you are almost ridiculously resilient, indifferent to mortification, self-confident in the face of almost constant failure, loyal to teammates to the point of absurdity and just plain spit-in-everyone’s-eye cussed.

Fans of the Nats, certainly those with stomachs of merely normal strength, may want to avert their eyes for a few weeks, maybe double-down on following the Stanley Cup champion Capitals, because this isn’t going to be pretty.

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The Nats’ lineup misses the arrogance of Harper. The bullpen is a big arm short of a load because the Lerners and General Manager Mike Rizzo miscalculated the money it would take to fix their needs. Martinez is going to have to show he can fulfill a manager’s toughest essential job: creating a functioning bullpen, almost regardless of the raw materials on hand. If he can, then maybe he really is a big-league manager.

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So, take a very deep breath. There are going to be many tense games like Wednesday’s win in which the Nats incinerated three more outs with trash base-running: two men thrown out at third base (a sin) and another picked off second base with no outs (mortal sin).

A lot of toughness will be needed, and even that might make a record around .500 after six weeks a relative success before matters get sorted out. Sometimes, surviving is all that matters.

Spring training is the time for optimism. Anything else borders on sports mental illness. But the regular season is for realism, even instant realism.