This is the thing Mickey Callaway has seen in his heart, if not with his eyes, across the first 31 games of this up-and-down first month of the season. Callaway is a manager now, but he was a pitching coach before, and that means there will always be a plurality of his soul that sees the world as a pitcher does: in increments, in bits, in pieces, in pitches.

Even as the ERA among the Mets’ starting pitchers swelled beyond 5.00 in recent weeks, even as all five members absorbed poundings and pulverizings at one time or another, Callaway was able to use selective memory.

He’s seen Noah Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom at their best, which is to say as good as any pitchers in baseball. He’s seen Zack Wheeler and Steven Matz and even Jason Vargas at the top of their games, so he was able to look beyond a couple of first-inning implosions by Matz and Vargas in recent weeks, and a few outings when Wheeler seemed to be throwing BP.

“Starting pitchers feed off each other,” Callaway had said late Thursday morning, “and they push each other. One starts to do good, the others want to top them. That’s what we want to get to here.”

Even before Noah Syndergaard went out and pulled off a Little League daily double in a 1-0 win over Cincinnati — 10 strikeouts and a four-hit shutout on the mound, fortified by a mammoth opposite-field home run at the plate, prompting Pete Alonso to call him “a one-man wrecking crew” — the Mets had put together their first solid stretch all year of starting pitching:

Matz, Sunday: 7 innings, 5 hits, 2 runs.

Wheeler, Monday: 6 innings, 7 hits, 4 runs (all in the second inning).

Vargas, Tuesday: 5 ¹/₃ innings, 3 hits, 1 run.

DeGrom, Wednesday: 7 innings, 3 hits, 0 runs.

The fact the Mets were only 2-2 in those games (thanks to a pair of ninth-inning home runs surrendered by the guy who had heretofore been their best pitcher, Edwin Diaz) is actually beside the point in the big picture: The Mets were in position to win all four. That is all a starting pitcher can do. And that is what these Mets are built on.

The early spasms of offense that marked March and April always felt like an outlier; this team might not be as offensively challenged as a few other Mets teams of recent vintage, but it isn’t built to score six runs a game, either. And that ought to be fine: The blueprint remains winning far more games 3-1 than 8-7.

“This is who we are,” Callaway said. “This is who we expect to be.”

Syndergaard, of course, was something to behold. His 104th and final pitch was clocked at 99.5 mph, and it froze Yasiel Puig for his 10th strikeout of the game. His shutout/homer parlay wasn’t just remarkable, it was one of the rarest things you’ll ever see in baseball. In the over 210,000 games played in major league history, 23 men have thrown perfect games.

But only seven have done what Syndergaard did, going the distance and providing the game’s only run with a homer. Bob Welch was the last to do it, 36 years ago.

Syndergaard was bemused by that, knowing his arm is what butters his bread and his bat merely serves as a hobby, like collecting stamps. He was far more enthused by the shutout, five days after saying that baseballs in his hands felt like ice cubes, five days after the Brewers battered him and inflated his ERA to an unsightly 6.35.

We are early enough in the season that he was able to shave more than a run and a quarter off that number with a pile of nine zeroes. And we are far enough along in the Syndergaard-deGrom partnership atop the Mets’ rotation that Syndergaard is comfortable admitting when he saw deGrom shake off his early-season miseries Wednesday, he was eager to try to match him, and more.

“Absolutely,” he said. “We try to support each other every way we can.”

Callaway was blunter: “Guys in a rotation want to outdo the other guy. Pitching staffs get on a roll that way and I think this one is starting to do something special. The last time through the rotation, you can’t ask for anything more.”

The Mets will take a 3-2 record every five days, because 3-2 across 162 days means 97 wins, and 97 wins means the vision of who this team is built to be will have been fulfilled. It’s just one turn through the rotation. But finally Callaway’s vision is visible beyond his own eyes, and his own heart.