Of all the baseball gospels Buck Showalter has preached since he took over as Mets manager, the one that resonates through all the rest is this: Keep things as simple as possible. Don’t overcomplicate. Don’t overcompensate. See the ball. Hit the ball. Field the ball. Worry about today. Tomorrow will take care of itself.

That is the core of the Mets’ ethos, and the fuel behind their 35-17 start. The Mets beat the Nationals on Wednesday, 5-0, because they treated the game as the most important item on their agenda, and acted accordingly: five shutout innings from Carlos Carrasco; a big day from an Irregular, this time Tomas Nido; perfect defense.

If anyone uttered the word “Dodgers,” it didn’t come from inside the home-team clubhouse. It may have been on the minds of fans, who have circled this coming 10-game road swing through Los Angeles, San Diego and Anaheim in red ink, a barometer for belief that their eyes haven’t been lying to them. It may have been on the lips of the scribes, forever taking a team’s temperature and measuring them for the back page.

But the Mets themselves?

“I’m in the here and now,” Showalter said.

Asked if the week and half ahead wasn’t a litmus test — and look, of course it will be a litmus test — Showalter said: “I thought today was a litmus test. I thought [Tuesday, a 10-0 drubbing of the Nats] was a litmus test. They count, right?”

And look: Showalter is good, damn good, but he didn’t invent this kind of thinking. Almost all coaches and managers talk about worrying only about the task at hand, simplifying things for their players. It’s something you learn in the first week of Coaching 101.

The trick is the buy-in.

The secret is getting the ones who really count — the players — to look through the same prism. And as with most other things, these Mets are essentially a 26-man vessel to Showalter’s baseball soul.

They bought in to the put-the-ball-in-play mantra that has defined the offense across all 52 games so far. They take extra bases. They don’t give extra outs. They aren’t always perfect — if the bullpen was, the record would be even gaudier — but they bury it and move on. And they have, to a man, refused to use the injuries among them as a crutch.

“We don’t underestimate any opponent,” said Francisco Lindor, who drove in a run for the 10th straight game, added a hit and has raised his batting average almost 60 points in a couple of weeks. “We take every opponent and play the game right and give them the proper respect.”

Or, as Showalter puts it: “Don’t overthink it.”

OK. So it was probably somewhere deep over the flyover states Wednesday night that Showalter joined the rest of us in building a full-blown interest in this trip, specifically the next four games at Dodger Stadium, which will feature the teams with the two best records in the National League.

It is, in truth, a perfect series at the perfect time. The Mets are raging hot, playing their best baseball of a season in which they’ve mostly played superb baseball and bringing a double-digit divisional lead out West. The Dodgers have been humbled this week by the Pirates, but they’ve mostly been their gold-standard selves.

The Mets don’t have to answer or apologize for their record.

But a good showing at Chavez Ravine would certainly alter the NL narrative for the time being and would reinforce in reality what seems perfectly clear: The Mets can look the Dodgers in the eyes right now.

It’s a fun storyline. And one that will go unnoticed and unspoken in the visiting dugout at Dodger Stadium. The Mets aren’t about making bold proclamations or big-picture statements. They treat every game as the most important item on their daily agenda, and act accordingly. And then do it all over again the next day, opponent be damned: Nats, Bucs, Phillies, Dodgers, Yankees.

“We’re playing really good baseball,” Lindor said, “regardless of who we’re playing.”

It’s an attitude channeled from manager to players, one that has served the Mets well the first two months of the season. The rest of us can have our fun this week, projecting what a good road trip — or a bad one — might mean. And the Mets — led by Showalter — will simply do their jobs. And why should this stretch of schedule affect them differently?

“We knew it was coming,” Showalter said, with a look that asked, incredulously: “Didn’t you?”