INDIANAPOLIS – Frank Reich has brought the Colts back from the brink, from 1-5 to the edge of the playoffs, from the ugly darkness of an Andrew Luck-less past back to the light of a contender, by ignoring all of the implications.

He wants his team to avoid the bigger picture.

Reich, the former pastor, preaches the virtues of the present.

“We don’t look back,” linebacker Darius Leonard said. “We don’t look forward. We just talk about going week-to-week and being 1-0 after each week.”

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A comeback win over the Giants on Sunday, coupled with a Steelers loss in New Orleans, set the stage for the kind of regular season finale that makes sports great, a win-and-get-in game against the Tennessee Titans in the season finale on Sunday.

“We’re not changing,” Reich said. “Keeping the same mantra: 1-0. Get better. After the game, we just said, ‘hey, we’ve got one week guaranteed to us, that’s it. Let’s make the most of it.”

This philosophy, Reich’s dogged pursuit of detail, is not necessarily unique. Plenty of teams around the NFL — around the NBA, MLB, NHL and NCAA for that matter — talk about tuning out the outside noise and turning their attention to the here and now, taking care of all of the little details in order to get the big results they want.

The difference in Indianapolis is how much these Colts take Reich’s message to heart.

His quarterback, Andrew Luck, has directed 21 fourth-quarter comebacks in his career by focusing only on the play at hand, climbing out of deep holes by keeping his eyes on the next grip and the next ledge, rather than glancing up at the freedom above.

“I think the way we’ve improved, why we are in this position is because we’ve focused on getting better,” Luck said after directing another comeback on Sunday. “We’ve focused on the process.”

His defensive coordinator, Matt Eberflus, has orchestrated a surprising defensive turnaround in Indianapolis by preaching the same four words over and over: alignment, assignment, key and technique. He hasn’t motivated his defense by throwing lackluster expectations at them, hasn’t used the well-worn approach of saying nobody believed in these Colts.

Eberflus, like his head coach, is laser-locked onto the process.

“The only way you can climb a mountain is one step at a time,” Eberflus said last week.

The Colts haven’t talked about the playoffs, haven’t talked about becoming only the third team in NFL history to overcome a 1-5 start and make the postseason.

Reich won’t even allow himself to think that way. Asked on Monday if the clear prize at the end of this Titans game makes this week the ultimate 1-0, Reich refused to bite.

“I haven’t even thought about it in that terms,” Reich said. “We’re just convinced that the best way is not to weight the importance of it, but to weight the importance of practice and the everyday process.”

The stakes are going to be hard to ignore this week.

A Colts team that has mostly operated in the comfortable quiet of a packed afternoon schedule will be thrust into the spotlight of NBC’s “Sunday Night Football,” playing the final regular-season game of the NFL schedule. Indianapolis has won eight of its last nine while bigger teams and bigger games got the headlines; the entire NFL will turn its eyes to the Colts and Titans almost as soon as kids finish opening their Christmas presents.

“We’ve acknowledged that we don’t live in a vacuum,” Reich said. “All the more reason to understand there’s this gravitational pull going the other way of the mindset we want to have.”

That pull is strong. It’s natural, the human temptation to let the mind drift to the future, to the promise of bigger things to come.

An eye on the future can be a motivating presence.

But it can also cause people to miss the details in an effort to get there sooner.

“It’s not negative or evil,” Reich said. “It’s just not the most productive mindset for us playing the game.”

Reich’s philosophy has been proven this season.

Focusing on 1-0 works.

The philosophy is a big reason why the Colts have pulled themselves out of that 1-5 hole, how Indianapolis has put itself on the precipice of a history-making achievement, a turnaround that is happening faster than most experts saw coming. When a team is focused on the next step, it’s impossible to see how high it has to climb.

“I think because of how Frank operates our building, and the focus on the day-to-day and the focus on improving and understanding that a result — a win or a loss — is a consequence of the process throughout the week, the process of the game, the process of the cycle of each play,” Luck said. “I think we understand that in a sense anything is possible if you don’t look ahead, you’re not worried about (the big picture). You are just focused on improving, and we have got to continue to do that, we really do.”

There’s no point in changing the philosophy now.

The Colts are nearly at the top.

Follow IndyStar Colts Insider Joel A. Erickson on Twitter at @JoelAErickson.

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