Much to the delight of their fans, no team has won as many games in a row as the 2017 Cleveland Indians. Michael F. McElroy for ESPN

The Indians do all these things and more, but what they do not do, except under the duress of direct questioning, is talk about the streak, at least while it's happening.

"The mindset really isn't on the winning streak," Greg Allen says.

"We're not wrapped up in it," Kluber says.

"We're not talking about it as much as you guys are," Cody Allen says.

Everyone else certainly talks about it. Some analysts call it the most dominant stretch of baseball ever played. Led by Edwin Encarnacion and Carlos Santana, Cleveland hits more home runs than its opponents score runs. Kluber and Carlos Carrasco lead the pitching staff to an ERA under 2.00. Their run differential across the 22 wins is greater than their run differential for all of last season -- and that team won the pennant.

They sweep the Orioles and the Tigers.

They steadfastly say they aren't that concerned with the record.

"We haven't talked about it at all," Kluber says.

"We're playing good baseball," outfielder Jay Bruce says.

Ballplayers are always concerned about anything that might upset the delicate equilibrium they have constructed one routine day after another. Only the rare team can be like the 2017 Indians; nearly every other team would let the streak consume them, including last year's Indians. One of the players quotes a former Cleveland coach, Scott Radinsky, who pitched in the big leagues and fronted an underground but important punk band, a kind of free spirit who allows a clubhouse to function, to balance the prima donnas and the insane.

He always said he wanted to play with the kind of men he could lose with.

The same idea applies to winning.

"Success will mess with you," Bauer says. "Sometimes you get, 'I can skip this because I'm good.' It takes a lot of mental discipline to stick with it regardless of outcome."

The Indians say the streak brings lightness and air to the room. But they refuse to chase it, or revel in it, or pretend that it has its own meaning or value, other than getting them back to the postseason, where they came up one run short a year ago.

A streak brings attention and pressure, which continue to exist after the spark that creates it is extinguished. So they've spent six months in present tense, taking cues from their manager, who conducts 22 postgame news conferences while sidestepping and tap-dancing and refusing to say the streak carries any significance. "That's why Tito is so good at what he does," Allen says after a win, as Pitt and Penn State play on a television near his locker. "Regardless of if we won 10 in a row or lost eight in a row, he's the same guy."

Down the hall, Francona sits in his office behind a huge framed picture of himself as a child, in the Indians dugout with his dad. He is, perhaps more than anyone else in the game, a creation of this weird, subterranean clubhouse world. "I'm probably more comfortable here than I am anywhere," he says, gesturing around at the concrete walls. "I think I have an advantage because I grew up here."

Some of his earliest memories are from clubhouses.

His father, the original Tito Francona, played for nine teams, including six seasons with Cleveland. Young Terry once walked across a field before a game to shake Ted Williams' hand. "Mr. Williams," he said, "I'm Mr. Francona's son, and he wanted me to come over and say hello."

Williams grinned at the boy.

"Well, you are a great-looking kid!" he replied. "Now I want to know one thing, young man. Can you hit?"

Francona saw how his father's friends treated each other and the game, and every lesson he got about how a man behaved was taught by ballplayers. His humor, his ethics, his personal code -- all shaped inside a stadium. As an 11-year-old, Francona got to go with his dad on a three-city road trip, through Minnesota, Chicago and Kansas City, riding the planes and buses, hearing the dirty jokes and lining his pockets with free clubhouse candy. His mom sent him off with combed hair and a sport coat and got back a road-busted mess of a kid, who loved every minute.

"It was probably the 10 funnest days of my life," Francona says during the streak.

Success will mess with you. Sometimes you get, 'I can skip this because I'm good.' It takes a lot of mental discipline to stick with it regardless of outcome. - Trevor Bauer

So he's been happy these past weeks, not because he's managing a team into the history books but because he's been at a baseball stadium. Sitting in his office, which was exactly 68 degrees, he brings up something his old boss Theo Epstein once said about him. "He loves the game," Epstein told Boston Globe baseball writer Dan Shaughnessy. "He physically loves the clubhouse. Emotionally, I think he loves to let go of the outside world. Some people compartmentalize the job. Tito compartmentalizes the real world and throws himself into the clubhouse. He loves every aspect of the clubhouse."

Francona smiles at the insight.

"I remember when I read that," Francona says. "I was like, damn. I obviously know Theo was smart, but if I was going to be candid, that's pretty damned close. To me, this is probably my real world. I admit that."

The clubhouse cost him a marriage and his health, and he can't count the nights he's spent on a couch in a stadium, curled up beneath a blanket, alone. In his office in Cleveland, there's a red and blue Indians-colored afghan that clearly looks as if it's for more than decoration. Most days, he gets to his office early, not because he's a hard worker, he says, but because he feels at home. Watching a stadium wake up makes him happy. Sitting in an empty cathedral like Fenway or Wrigley calms him; the present and past combine, the things he sees and the things he remembers washing over him together. He liked the way the boards creaked at the old Yankee Stadium because Babe Ruth probably heard that same noise. Even now, he enjoys hotel lobbies, because he'd hang out there when visiting his dad on the road, giving his old man space to sleep in and get ready for the game.

He will, when asked, cop to at least one superstition.

There's a friend, whom he has nicknamed Gray Cloud, who's always brought bad luck.

"I will not talk to him," Francona says. "He is text only. He's cost me one job, he's not getting in the way again."

Simplicity is the primary goal when he's constructing his existence. In Boston, he even spent most seasons living in a hotel. For Francona, every day is the same, down to the number of water bottles he lines up in the dugout, and the hourlong swim he takes and the cribbage game he organizes. "I have a car here that I use about three times a year," he says. "I got a little moped. I take it everywhere downtown. I know all the police. It's Cleveland. After games, I'll go down the one-way and they're like, 'Hey, good game.'"

He points out his office door.

"It's parked right here in the hallway."

He played 10 seasons in the big leagues and jokes to his players about what a lousy career he had. But he played through severe injury and pain, a grinder who understands the hopes all players bring with them into the clubhouse. He understands doubt and fear and ego and swagger, and what internal problem each of those things is an attempt to solve. During the streak, as more reporters arrive every day in the small interview room to talk about the streak, he's more interested in finding out why the Browns released Pro Bowler Joe Haden, refusing to engage in record-chasing narratives, talking about how a season is fluid and how only today exists. He smiles and sighs when people keep asking questions, as if they think he's spinning them and not living by the codes he internalized as a boy.

The streak will mean nothing come October. A year ago, the Indians took 14 in a row, rolling through opponents, and they still came up a game short in the World Series. That Game 7 loss influenced many things about this season, including the 22 games the team just won. Kipnis, the clubhouse monk in charge of Jobu, took the World Series loss harder than most.

"A lot of things got smashed," he says.

He pauses a beat.

"I was one of them."

In the ninth inning of Game 7, he launched a ball down the right-field line that just went foul. Standing in front of his locker, he says he's watched that replay a lot. "Fraction of an inch," he says, then demonstrating with his hand the slight bat angle that would have changed their lives. His hand doesn't seem to move at all. It's a tiny difference. "The following month you're at home in your boxers eating pizza," he says, "and you're watching Rizzo and Bryant on late-night television and on SNL and you're like, the fork in the road."

When baseball people look at the Indians, other than wondering what kind of analytics the team uses to help its pitchers scout opponents, that is what they talk about. How did the team not let last year's close call derail this season before it even began?

That's Francona.

At the beginning of the season, the team did suffer from a hangover. Kluber says the starters were slow and sluggish. Kipnis says the games didn't seem to matter as much. Francona called a rare meeting early in the summer, feeling his team caught in the back draft of last season, not living day to day, breaking the code. The players say things turned around after that, and the winning streak is the clearest and most outward example. There are others.

Last year's streak took on meaning and affected the clubhouse dynamic in small but real ways. If the music wasn't on in the clubhouse, someone would say something. Winning changed the mood in the room, and by the time it ended in Toronto, that's all they could think about.

"That's been the most impressive thing about this streak," Bauer says. "You come to the field and it doesn't feel like we have a winning streak going. We had a streak last year, and the intensity ramped up and then it got to the point where it just caught up to us. This year it feels completely different."

Bauer's been watching Francona closely and thinks Tito's life growing up in clubhouses, and the decades of experience in them as an adult, has built up this almost sixth sense about the subtle interpersonal dynamics some managers don't even know exist.

"He's in tune with how this environment works," Bauer says. "He gets here, and something might seem off. Before anyone is even at the field, he's aware that something is off. Or something is on. Or something is different. He doesn't realize he's picking it up. It's just his sense for it. It's flow state. It occurs to him, and he doesn't even realize it."

No team has won as many games in a row as the 2017 Cleveland Indians, which is not how they want this season remembered. Last October left them longing to feel that joy and stress again, and they have almost made it through a long 183 days.

The streak ending is almost a relief because now the real business can begin.

The postseason is less than a month away.

"You're like ..." Kipnis says, and then he inhales deeply, like someone stepping out into the fresh air for the first time, "... we're back. You can see how we're playing. The team's been waiting for it. You see us getting close to it, and we're almost back there again."