Many will tell you the Washington team in spring training here is not the best version of the Nationals in recent times. You’ll hear that the Nats have no proven closer, that Jayson Werth is old and that Ryan Zimmerman plays old. Also, who says Bryce Harper will bounce back or that Stephen Strasburg won’t get hurt again? This is a team full of questions, it’s said, and its window may shrink after 2018.

I answer in two opposite ways. “That’s correct.” And, “Have you watched much baseball?”

A lot of Nats have watched plenty of baseball. They have thoughts about what happens to a franchise’s “best teams” and about closing windows.

Werth has a World Series ring from the 2008 champion Phillies. “That wasn’t our best team or even our second best,” he said last week. That 92-win team may even have been the Phils’ fourth best from 2008 through 2011. “But it’s the team that won it all,” Werth said. “It had the best chemistry. And some luck.”

The most gifted of those Phils teams was the 2011 club with 102 wins and four aces, Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels. Yet they lost in the first round. “That team had everybody,” said Werth, who became a National in 2011, “except me.”

Nationals left fielder Jayson Werth won a World Series title with Philadelphia in 2008, but he was already in Washington by the time the Phillies’ best team, in 2011, lost in the first round. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)

[From spring training: Lucas Giolito gets a fresh start]

After his Nats were KO’ed last year, Nationals General Manager Mike Rizzo rooted for his hometown Cubs. “I was happy they won,” he said. Oh, to end that 108-year-old drought? “Yes,” he said, “but it was also nice to see the best team in baseball win . . . for a change.”

Rizzo doesn’t just feel this way because his Nats had the majors’ best record in 2012 but got knocked out in the first round. Rizzo was also one of the initial hires of the expansion Diamondbacks in 1998. In 2001, Arizona beat the New York Yankees in one of the greatest World Series. Yet, by many criteria, those D’backs were not as good as the 100- and 98-win teams of 1999 and 2002. One difference: In the last inning of the season, Arizona won, in part, because usually flawless Yankees reliever Mariano Rivera made a fielding error.

“What you hope to control is building a team that’s good enough to get into the playoffs,” Rizzo said. “The more times you get there — well, it doesn’t have to be your ‘best team’ that wins.”

Everybody in baseball grasps this reality and kind of hates it because in the NFL and NBA the best team — by record, reputation or any measure you want — has a better chance of being champion.

But ballplayers also take a perverse pride in the cussedness, the long, dry wait for good luck and chemistry, which seem to be handmaidens of a championship.

“If we can just get past the first round, we can get rolling,” Werth said. “Those five-game [division] series are so tough.”

[Perspective: Daniel Murphy had a good year. He’s planning on another.]

No wonder World Series rings feel so precious. Those who have them feel like they were won by grace as well as gifts, like Werth and Rizzo, Manager Dusty Baker, coach Davey Lopes and executive Bob Boone. All have one ring.

They all have the same story, too: Not our best team — not even close.

Every aspiring franchise starts with the same goal that’s motivated the Nats: Build a talented team that wins lots of games. That’s been done. What next? This spring, Baker has talked to the Nats about qualities that distinguish champs.

Dusty has been quizzing Hall of Famers in every sport his whole life. Once he asked Red Auerbach and Bill Russell of the 11-time NBA champion Boston Celtics what was the key to their 1956 to 1969 dynasty. “They both said the same thing — ‘We loved each other,’ ” Baker said. “Not exactly what you’d expect from big Bill Russell.”

The Nats would probably trade a truck load of love for a simple “Yes,” from either Mark Melancon or Kenley Jansen for their big free agent offers this winter. Then the Nats, especially after signing free agent catcher Matt Wieters last week, would probably get “picked” to win by a lot more people.

Every contending team wants to get incrementally better in any way it can. And it should. But those last few wins worth of hypothetical excellence aren’t usually remembered when you’re as old as Baker, Lopes or Boone, or even Rizzo and Werth. What gets recalled, and cherished, is often the last ounce of bonding, of fury at the thought of losing together.

And, oh, yes, one other thing. Maybe a Mariano Rivera error or a rain delay in the 10th inning of Game 7 just when the Cubs need it. Okay, a little luck, too.