PHILADELPHIA — Not only have the Phillies been more or less resting for the past five days, they’re less creaky than their oh-so familiar National League Division Series opponent, the New York Mets. If you’re going by current rosters, the Mets average out to the second-oldest team in the major leagues at 30.3 years, behind only their possible NLCS opponents, the Los Angeles Dodgers. True to their age, the Mets are also banged up and not so well rested. That was evidenced by the announcement Friday that would-be ace Kodai Senga, who has been unhealthy this season to the point that he made all of one appearance, in July against Atlanta, lasting 5.1 innings then marching off to sick bay again, is the Game 1 starter Saturday at Citizens Bank Park. The Phillies? They come in at No. 10 of the 30 MLB teams on the old list, certainly not spring chickens but perhaps qualifying as a collective group still in its prime. Prime or not, they know the time to achieve what they are again chasing is now. So after a terribly disappointing finish to their 2023 playoff and two years removed from a surprise World Series appearance, the Phillies start another postseason journey Saturday with this better-of-five NLDS. “I think the experience we gained the last two years, it’s addicting,” catcher J.T. Realmuto said Friday. “Winning in the postseason, that’s something we all enjoy doing and we’ve become accustomed to it. If we want to take that next step and actually be able to finish if off this year, and win the World Series, I feel the experience we gained the last two years, both the good and the bad, will help us in this round.” It helped in 2022 that one magical comeback inning in Game 1 of the Wild Card round sprung them to a series win in St. Louis, and a journey that would only end with a tough loss to a loaded Houston Astros team in the World Series. Maybe it helps, too, that in 2023 a predicted repeat appearance in the Series seemed almost certain until a 3-2 NLCS lead over the Arizona Diamondbacks was undercut by two D-Backs victories in Games 6 and 7 at Citizens Bank Park. “This is a tough place to play,” Game 1 Phillies starter and staff ace Zack Wheeler said of CBP. “We always took it that way, but the Diamondbacks came in here and beat us in two games to win that series last year, and that kind of hurt us. So we’re that much more hungry this year. It kind of left a bad taste in our mouths and we don’t want to do that for our fans. All we needed to do was win one last year, and we didn’t do it. So we’re pretty hungry this year.” For every year that goes by, the hunger increases, as does the age. Wheeler is 34. Realmuto is 33. Bryce Harper turns 32 on Oct. 16.  Nick Castellanos is already there. Aaron Nola is 31, as is Trea Turner and Kyle Schwarber. The core is a very ripe one. “I don’t feel like our window is closing, I keep hearing that,” team president Dave Dombrowski said. “I think what happens, sometimes it closes with the current players that you have, but it doesn’t mean that it closes overall. I’m not saying that this is the time period. But we have young players coming that I really like. So what you’re ideally looking to do is, some players age, they get older, and some of their skills diminish at times. That’s just a fact. Some at different paces.” What stays is the hunger. Especially when the opponent is oh, so familiar. Perhaps no two teams within a short drive of each other know each other as well as the Phillies and Mets do. The teams have played 1,081 times since the Mets were born in 1962, with the Phillies winning 525 times, 30 less than the Mets (there was one tie). They were close this year, too, the Phillies winning seven of the teams’ 13 meetings during the season. With all that, they’ve never played against each other in the postseason. Who better than Wheeler, a five-season Mets stalwart when he came here via free agency ahead of the 2020 season, to appreciate the closeness between the teams (though not their fans). “It’s fun playing against those guys always, but at the same time I’ve been over here for a while now and there’s no hard feelings,” Wheeler said. “Things have kind of changed over there personnel wise, so it’s just baseball at this point.” As the summer wore on, all the Mets seemed to do was win. New York went from 11 games below .500 early in June to overtaking the Atlanta Braves for second in the division, and beating out other wild card contenders. They also won in late-game dramatic fashion along the way. No comeback victory this year matched what they did in the Wild Card round, down 2-0 going into the ninth inning of Game 3 against the Brewers, and winning 4-2, keyed by a dramatic Pete Alonso three-run homer. “He likes the spotlight and that was a perfect spot for him,” said Alonso’s former teammate Wheeler. “He’s a good guy … maybe he wasn’t swinging the way he’d like to, but he always has that power in his back pocket, and he can always do what he did at that moment. “There’s a lot of familiarity there. They know me and I know them and it’s kind of a cat and mouse game at this point,” Wheeler added. “They played really hard over there, they scrapped and they played well down the stretch and they made it to the playoffs. So credit to them. It’s hard to make the playoffs, for sure.” It’s harder yet, of course, to play well enough to keep winning in the playoffs. For that challenge, the well-seasoned Phillies are back to try again. “We came in, in 2022, without a lot of expectations and just kind of grew as a team and gained a lot of confidence in each other,” Realmuto said. “Last year there were more expectations on us and we didn’t perform the way we wanted to. This year we have to go in and know that every day is a new day and we can’t get too high with the highs and too low with the lows. Until the series is over, we can’t count our eggs. “We went into Arizona up 2-0 last year and felt great about it and we didn’t finish the job. So no matter what happens at the beginning of the series we have to continue to push and continue to fight until the end.”