There have been exceptions to this rule, of course, something we were reminded of last Thursday night in Philadelphia. Good teams beat you in a variety of ways across 162 games. Sometimes they come back on you. Sometimes they crush you. There is no one formula to follow.

But if you were to try and craft a quintessential win for these 21-10 Mets across the first month of the season, it would look something like this:

— Excellent starting pitching.

—  A lineup that doesn’t always score runs in bunches — or score them early — but figures out ways to reach the scoreboard as the game wears on.

—  At least one well-executed, smart play.

—  Edwin Diaz closing things out with a low-drama save.

In other words: a game that looks almost exactly like the 4-2 beating the Mets laid on the Washington Nationals Tuesday night in Washington.

“It’s great to have players who embrace the game with that skill set,” Mets manager Buck Showalter said after watching Carlos Carrasco pitch another superb 6 ²/₃ innings before enjoying a perfect night from his bullpen. “Lots of people contributed tonight.”

Carrasco, to date, is the Mets’ feel-good story of the season. A relentlessly pleasant man, he suffered through a grisly year in 2021, hamstring and bone-chip issues rendering him all but un-pitchable by late summer. Now, despite a blip a few weeks ago in St. Louis, he is every bit as reliable as the rotation’s boldfaced names.

Of course, for much of the night, it looked like Cookie’s fine night might go to waste. Patrick Corbin and his 6.06 ERA shut the Mets down for five innings, a stretch that looked (a little too uncomfortably) like a 2021 Mets game, one scoring opportunity wasted after another.

But in the sixth, the Mets put together exactly the kind of opportunistic three-run rally they’re beginning to trademark: singles by their 4-5 hitters, Pete Alonso and J.D. Davis; a walk; and then Jeff McNeil’s rocket ground ball to first that slithered under Josh Bell’s glove. If the ball is hit maybe 5 mph softer Bell turns it into a rally-killing 3-6-3. Instead the game was tied.

“I was trying to get something over the center of the plate, not trying to get too big,” McNeil said. “And [Carl Edwards Jr., the Nats pitcher] threw something for me to handle.”

But the Mets also have made a habit so far this year of doubling down on opponents’ mistakes by making heady plays of their own. And so Maikel Franco’s ice-breaking RBI double wound up also as an 8-4-2 double play, nailing Yadiel Hernandez at the plate. James McCann also threw out the still-speedy Dee Strange-Gordon on a steal attempt to end the seventh.

And Diaz made quick work of the Nats in the ninth, inducing a 4-6-3 double play from Hernandez to end the game. Once he can enter a ninth inning without Mets’ fans hearts skipping a beat out of fear and loathing, we’ll know things are officially in a different plane of existence for the Mets. But he’s getting there.

It was a textbook Mets game out of 2022.

Now, the Nationals (now 10-21) are an awful team, and will be the team this year that the other four hopefuls in the NL East will try to feast on as often as possible. But the Mets are 4-1 so far in five games (all played in D.C.). That is also not unusual. The Mets, who for years have had their professionalism and seriousness questioned, are a serious, all-business team. It shows.

“The way we’re doing everything before the game, we have a plan before the game, that’s what we’ve been doing,” Carrasco said. “If something changes during the game we go back and change it.”

He was being specific to the pitchers. But it applies all around the clubhouse. The Mets are the team who has a plan every night. The Mets are the team that seizes games, and doesn’t let them seize them. Thirty-one games is still only 31 games. But the Mets are the better prepared team every night now. The Mets are the resilient team.

If that’s really the textbook version of the 2022 Mets?

Order a crate of those textbooks.