A lot of minutes have gone into building the longest streak of consecutive minutes in MLS history. 12,690 to be precise. On Saturday afternoon, Luis Robles, the “Iron Man”, will start in goal for New York Red Bulls, just as he has done for the 141 previous MLS games in a row.

There have been spectacular moments that have stood out in that amazing run, but the real story of Robles’ extraordinary sequence has not been one of incendiary flashes, but of the player taking on more and more responsibility until his arrival as the unquestioned heart of the New York team almost appeared to have happened unnoticed.

Speaking to the Guardian this week, Robles did acknowledge some key moments in that process. One came in the aftermath of the Red Bulls’ Eastern Conference final loss at Gillette Stadium in 2014. It was Thierry Henry’s last game, and in the locker room the sense of the team fragmenting around him seemed palpable. Henry himself trolled the press with exactly four words before disappearing behind a curtain at the far end of the locker room. In the center of the room, Tim Cahill was addressing anyone who’d listen with his own valedictory remarks on how his presence had grown the team and the league he was about to leave. Out in the corridor, coach Mike Petke was conducting what would turn out to be his last press conference as head coach of New York Red Bulls – back pressed against the concrete wall of a Gillette Stadium service tunnel by an impromptu press throng/firing squad.

And seated just by the door to the locker room, a stoical team goalkeeper was discreetly taking in the multi-ring circus around him, offering a postmortem on the game to the few reporters who asked, and realizing that more than just a cup run was ending.

“I remember that moment, absolutely,” says Robles. “Tim was definitely on his way out of the door, we were pretty sure Thierry was going to retire, and you could read between the lines what was happening. It was no different from any other year I’ve been here in that each year the demands have gone up and up and up, but at that moment I knew there was going to be a lot more weight on my shoulders – on all our shoulders. But I was ready for it.”

It had been coming. The start of Robles’ Iron Man sequence had already brought him a Supporters’ Shield in his first full season with the club in 2013, and 2014 had seen the team finally beat DC United in a playoff series, only to stumble against New England in the Eastern Conference final. But that was still essentially Henry’s team – with just a dash of local populism thrown in by the Red Bull owners, in the shape of fan favorite Petke as coach. There was a dropoff in global reputation and natural authority when it came to the supporting cast, including Robles. But now with Petke on the outs, Henry retiring and Cahill heading to China, Robles, and a cohort of now senior players that included Dax McCarty, Bradley Wright-Phillips, and soon, Sacha Kljestan, would form something of a squad of lieutenants on the field for new coach Jesse Marsch.

“At the end of 2014, it was actually my exit interview with Mike Petke and he told me: ‘You continue to improve as a goalkeeper and we can’t ask for more than that, but this year we need you to take on a mantle of leadership, and if you do that, it’s going to get us closer to MLS Cup – and not only that, you’re going to be goalkeeper of the year.”

Petke himself would be gone within weeks of that interview, but Robles took the demand seriously, and if anything threw himself in at the deep end. The start of 2015 saw him driving to Washington DC with McCarty to negotiate as team union reps in the CBA with the league. Within days he’d be voluntarily sitting in a chair at a contentious town hall meeting with fans, quietly asking for support for the team on the field, as beleaguered senior management sat beside him, defending the decision to fire Petke.

But Robles treated those roles with the same sense of duty and essential decency that have been the mark of the man. He also played every minute of every game in that 2015 season and by the end of the year he had won a Supporters’ Shield and was indeed MLS goalkeeper of the year. In 2016 that would be followed by a regular season Eastern Conference title, in an era that has seen the Red Bulls evolve from perennial flakes (remember the Curse of Caricola?) to consistent contenders, with Robles as the rock of the team.

New York Red Bulls in action against Vancouver in the Concacaf Champions League. Photograph: Julio Cortez/AP

Still no MLS Cup, though. Annual puzzling defeats in the playoffs, to the likes of Houston, New England, Columbus and Montreal, have also been a hallmark of Robles’ tenure. And that, more than any personal record, is what drives him on: “This record is nice and everything – and by the way I can’t stress enough the part that luck and playing with incredibly talented team mates plays in that – but it’s kind of meaningless without winning an MLS Cup, right?”

Not quite meaningless. It’s an obvious truth, but it undersells the significance of Robles surviving three coaching changes and four sporting directors, all while a club in the most competitive media market in the USA is still falling short of its ultimate goal. Under the pressurized circumstances it suggests that Luis Robles has never been the problem. The team have never enjoyed a more successful streak than during his long run in goal. He’s an unquestioned starter.

Not that it was always this way. Robles’ mid-season return to the league in 2012, after a coaching change had seen him drop down the ranks at Kaiserslautern, was a fraught affair owing to the league’s allocation order for US internationals returning to MLS. Robles didn’t know where he might end up, and even when he found out it would be New York, he had little faith he’d be staying there, knowing of the club’s then penchant for dramatic off-season roster turnovers.

“The allocation order was the bane of my life. We had all of this uncertainty and I knew there were several teams sort of interested and New York was one of them, but they were way down the allocation order. Then for one reason or another, the other teams above them in the order weren’t interested and I was going to New York. I was amazed, but to be honest I didn’t think I’d be there long. I told my wife I didn’t think we should unpack…”

Was there a point where he felt free to open the moving boxes?

“I still don’t feel that anything’s guaranteed. I mean that’s professional sports, right? A mis-timed tackle, a bad turn, and you can be out for four months. Anything can happen, and it’s out of my hands. Also, you look at what happened in the off-season with one of our key players. Things change quickly.”

Robles is diplomatic on the subject, but if there was ever a signal that no player is indispensable, it was the sudden off-season sale of Dax McCarty, his union partner, and fellow team leader, to Chicago Fire. It broke up that group of senior surrogates for the Marsch project on the field, and forced the remaining trio of Robles, Wright-Phillips and Kljestan to reconsider their contributions to the collective leadership of the team.

“The three of us have actually met to talk about that – there’s definitely a void there with Dax gone and there’s a learning curve with replacing that. It’s not as if Sacha, Brad and myself are naturally the most vocal people. I know that at times we have leaned on leading by example and hoping that people gravitate towards that, but now it’s about stepping that bit further out of ourselves and being more vocal. But there’s no reason we can’t grow into the type of leaders who can take the club to the next level.”

At least the effort to match that challenge should come naturally. We talk a little about the Japanese business idea of kaizen – loosely translated as “constant improvement” – and Robles likes the idea.

“I think that’s excellent and in a sense it was how I was raised. My mom’s from South Korea, and my dad’s Puerto Rican and a military man. I definitely got my work ethic from him – you could set your watch by the way he left the house at 6.30am every morning and got him exactly at 4pm. You didn’t think about it at the time but it made a real impression.”

Robles’ parents will be at the game this weekend, though he says it’s a coincidence that they’ll happen to be present to mark his own feat of day-to-day repetition – his brother, who is at West Point, is leaving for military service overseas and the close family is primarily gathering in the region to mark that.

But perhaps it’s apt that Robles’ remarkable feat of consistency is a secondary motivation for his parents’ trip. After all it’s secondary for him too. The Iron Age of Luis Robles is solidly in the record books. Now he wants silver.