Even from 230 miles away, Jon Matlack can sense what’s going on at Citi Field, and what’s igniting it. Matlack knows as well as anyone what can happen when you get a small gaggle of elite pitchers, send them out against the National League night after night, take your chances with what follows.

“It’s been true in baseball a long time,” Matlack said with a laugh over the telephone from his home in Johnsburg, N.Y., up in the Adirondacks. “You keep the other team from scoring runs, you’re going to have an awfully good chance to win the game.”

Forty-six years ago it was Matlack, Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman and George Stone who Yogi Berra turned to every day during one of the most remarkable turnarounds in baseball history. The Mets have spent much of this season celebrating the 1969 team that channeled an unforgettable summer of magic.

But in many ways the real miracle took place four years later. The 1973 Mets fell as many as 13 games under .500 on Aug. 17 and were still in last place Aug. 30, 10 under and six out, needing to leapfrog five teams. They did. They went 20-8 in September and October, finished 82-79, a game-and-a-half ahead. They beat the Reds in the NLCS. They took the dynasty Athletics to Game 7 of the ’73 World Series.

That ’73 team is the patron saint of lost baseball causes. Every team that finds itself drowning in the dog days of summer can always turn to that team and ask: Why not us?

Mostly, it is because those teams can’t turn to Matlack, Seaver, Koosman and Stone every day. But that was always a funny thing about this year’s Mets. Even as they swooned in June, even as it sometimes felt like they were 30 games under .500 when they never fell further than 11 under, there was always one strand of thread to clutch for dear life:

Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, Zack Wheeler, Steven Matz. For most of this season, that felt like the cruelest kind of mirage. Except now, as the Mets have gone from 11 under to two over after Tuesday’s 5-0 whitewash of the Marlins, that strength is precisely what they’ve leaned on. At a time when it seemed like the Mets were going to lose Wheeler, they kept him — and added Marcus Stroman, too.

“You give yourself a chance to win every day with a good horse on the mound,” Matlack said, “you’re going to be able to make up a lot of ground.”

Wheeler has pitched 15 innings since not being traded and hasn’t allowed a run in any of them. It is impossible to ignore that the Mets have gotten fat against some awful teams, but it’s just as true that if they hope to sustain this once the front of the opposing uniforms read “Nationals” and “Braves” instead of “Pirates” and “White Sox,” the rotation is what will keep it going.

“Zack did a great job,” said Mets manager Mickey Callaway, who all year has talked about “making a run to .500” and constantly references the 22-game winning streak the Indians piled up two years ago. For a time that seemed delusional. Suddenly he seems a soothsayer.

“There’s no doubt when you think of our rotation it excites you, it’s one of the best in baseball,” he said. “And they’re pitching well right now.”

Said Wheeler: “We know how good we can be, and how good we are. We’re shooting for it.”

Something else echoes what the Mets’ forebears managed to do. In ’73, the NL East was an odd assortment of teams, a hard-to-figure hodgepodge. The Pirates, who finished first in five of the division’s first seven years, were still reeling from Roberto Clemente’s death and never quite fired their engine. The Cardinals started the year 3-16 and 7-22, yet by Aug. 5 were five games ahead in first place.

The Mets? Just about every significant player spent time on the disabled list, including Matlack, the 1972 Rookie of the Year who took a Marty Perez line drive off his head in May and suffered a fractured skull. But even as they struggled for five months, no one else took command of the East, the same as nobody has yet seized control of this year’s NL wild card.

“You dig yourself a hole, you hope nobody else is throwing dirt on you by running away with things,” Matlack said. “In ’73, nobody did. It allowed us to rescue ourselves even after having five tough months.”

The Mets know this well. If they were in the American League, they’d have started play Tuesday night 7½ games, not 2 ¹/₂, out of the second wild card. But they don’t play in the American League. The ’73 Mets would’ve finished 16½ games behind the Reds in the NL West. But they didn’t play in the NL West.

And so they became baseball’s beacon of lost causes. All scuffling teams dream of replicating them. They almost never do. The ’73 Mets actually finished off their comeback. The 2019 Mets still have work to do there. But they seem perfectly comfortable with following the blueprint. And it’s a good blueprint.