At times, a few brilliant moments in a sterling game are enough to make your mind jump out of its everyday rut of baseball details and instead see a much bigger picture. That happened in the Washington Nationals’ 1-0 win Sunday over the San Francisco Giants. Tanner Roark outdueled Madison Bumgarner, the Giants’ postseason legend. The only run came on a Wilson Ramos homer just minutes after an amazing, over-the-head catch at the 402-foot sign in center field by Ben Revere had robbed the Giants of two runs.

On days like this, you wonder: Is something special going on here? It sure feels like “Yes.”

You seldom will see a ballgame played at a higher level. The Giants, winners of three of the past six World Series, were determined to win the rubber game of the season series with the Nats so they would have home-field advantage in the playoffs if the two teams met and had identical records. The Nats were just as determined to treat this as a de facto playoff game.

Such a classic game, arriving unexpectedly on a sleepy, sweet summer afternoon, rearranges your perceptions. Walking across South Capitol Street, I wondered about the same daily topics as many fans anticipating a showdown between two first-place teams.

Would the Nats’ trade for all-star closer Mark Melancon at the trade deadline be the key decision that makes the World Series a realistic hope in 2016? How did General Manager Mike Rizzo get a man with 51 saves last year and a 1.38 ERA this season for the cost of Felipe Rivero and a Class A pitcher?

This game ended with Melancon pitching a 1-2-3 ninth inning, finishing with a three-pitch punch-out of the Giants’ Hunter Pence, whose lunging swings looked like my grandfather, the farmer, poking at a snake with a rake.

[Nationals’ win over the Giants may be a sign of good things to come]

This was a day for fans to chat about the boundaries of Trea Turner’s future; in recent days, he hit a 451-foot home run yet also ran to first base in 3.4 seconds from the right-hand batter’s box, making him one step slower than Mickey Mantle. Or you might wonder: Will Bryce ever glimpse that huge “Harper” tattoo on his side and remember, “I know how to hit.”

Then, in the second inning, the day’s epiphanies started. A Giants hitter sliced a foul pop near the third base box seats. No play — forget it. But Anthony Rendon and Danny Espinosa kept sprinting, backs to the ball, guessing its landing point. Left fielder Jayson Werth was sprinting toward the same spot. Disaster? “Oh, no, Bermuda Triangle,” Roark thought.

All three spinning Nats barely missed each other. No collision, no calamity. Yet the ball never hit the ground. Somebody had caught it. The Nats jogged to their dugout nonchalantly, inning over. Rendon had snagged the ball at the last instant — over his head at a dead sprint, but Espinosa’s glove was inches below Rendon’s. If one hadn’t caught the ball, the other would have.

“We’ve got a lot of guys that can really play this game,” Roark said.

That was just preamble. Revere robbed Brandon Belt of a two-RBI blast. “That was the Willie Mays Catch,” Nationals Manager Dusty Baker said, referencing the one from the 1954 World Series.

[Ben Revere’s catch reminds him of his football days]

When Ramos took Bumgarner for a 390-foot visit to the Navy Yard two pitches later, that’s when it hit me. This is the level of generally brilliant baseball that Washington has grown accustomed to over the past five years. And sometimes (me, too) forgets to appreciate.

Since 2012, the Nats have the second-most wins in MLB behind the Cardinals. You have heard that. Have you heard this? In that span of more than 750 games, the Cardinals and Nats dwarf the rest of MLB in run differential. They’re hundreds of runs better than anybody else.

Since 2012, St. Louis has outscored its foes by 513 runs, the Nats by 501. Next come the Dodgers, way back at plus-336 runs. Then come the Blue Jays, on the horizon, at plus-225.

Seriously, that kind of gap between two franchises and everybody else is nuts.

Washington has not won a postseason series yet in its two opportunities. The Nationals are 3-6 in that huge nine-game sample. But what ammunition is anybody going to have to gainsay the Nationals credit for what they have built if and when they have a good October?

The NL’s leading hitter now is Daniel Murphy (.350), who may be named the NL MVP; he is followed by Ramos (.338), who probably will take the Silver Slugger award at catcher away from Buster Posey. Stephen Strasburg is 15-2 and may win the Cy Young award. Or Max Scherzer, who leads MLB in strikeouts (198), could grab the award. The reigning NL MVP is Harper.

The Nats have the second-best ERA in baseball and the second-most homers in the NL. Their pitchers have more strikeouts than anybody and their defense the fewest errors. Rendon and Espinosa are an elegant defensive left side, but they also have 31 homers between them. Roark, now 12-6, plus Gio Gonzalez and Joe Ross (now on the DL) might be at the front of some rotations.

With the arrival of Melancon and Turner, there is no area in which the Nats aren’t at least good. In most: excellent. The Nats need “one more big bat.” By October, it could be Harper.

In 2005, when baseball came back to Washington after a 33-season absence, I analyzed how long expansion teams or horrible teams (like the 2004 Expos) that switched towns required to become contenders. It looked like D.C. might wait a decade for just one “real” fun team.

Washington fans sometimes get spoiled by this franchise — how it contends consistently yet never mortgages the future, not even for Melancon. At the trade deadline, general managers were in a holding pattern over Rizzo’s phone trying to pry away prospects like Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo Lopez, Koda Glover and Victor Robles. The Nats, with the game’s second-best record, weren’t antsy. They may know, better than most fans, how pretty they’re sitting with seven- and nine-game leads over the Marlins and Mets. The Nats’ odds to win the division: 97 percent.

If it happens, that would be three division titles in five years. How rare is that?

The Rockies and Marlins have never finished in first place in their divisions. The Orioles have finished first twice in the previous 32 years. In the past 21 years, the Red Sox, Cubs, White Sox and Reds all have three first-place years. The World Series champion Royals have one in the past 30 years. The Mets have been first only twice in the past 27 years. Others with one or zero division flags in the past 20 years: Milwaukee, Pittsburgh and Toronto.

The Nats have much to prove in October. But what they have built and maintained for the past five years is remarkable.

And what they have at this moment is probably their best team — ever.