PHILADELPHIA — Dave Dombrowski crisscrosses the country with a baseball team for six months — seven, if he’s lucky — and runs into fans of every stripe. His interactions with Detroit Tigers supporters usually go like this:

“They’re always like, ‘Jeez, what a great time period! We really enjoyed it,‘” he said recently. “‘They say, ‘It was fantastic. It was great.‘ ”

Dombrowski finds it mostly flattering. He’s proud of his 14 seasons as the Tigers president of baseball operations, especially 2011 to 2014, when Detroit won the most games in the majors and four division titles in a row for the only time in franchise history with a roster that featured three future Hall of Famers.

But Dombrowski also has a sneaking feeling that people are sometimes just being polite. Because for as successful as the Tigers were during their salad days of a decade ago, something’s missing.

They don’t have World Series rings.

“So I think, historically, it will never be viewed the same as the ‘68 and ‘84 [Tigers] teams because they won world championships,” Dombrowski said. “Even though they didn’t necessarily have the length of really good teams, the ultimate is achieving the world championship. That’s just kind of the way it goes.”

This all came up recently in Dombrowski’s spring training corner office in Clearwater, Fla., when it was noted during a wide-ranging conversation with The Philadelphia Inquirer that his 2025 team appears to be at a similar stage of its life cycle as the Tigers were entering 2015.

The Phillies, as you may know, have won more games in each of the last three seasons under Dombrowski. But like the 2012 to 2014 Tigers, they also backslid in the playoffs, from losing in Game 6 of the World Series in 2022 to getting eliminated at home in Game 7 of the National League Championship Series in 2023 and Game 4 of the divisional round last year.

It could be reasonably argued, then, depending on your point of view, that the Phillies are getting better and worse at the same time.

Actually, both things are true.

“There’s the give-and-take of, you like to win, you want to win, so you don’t want to take away winning the division,” Bryce Harper said. “But obviously we haven’t got the main goal done. We haven’t checked that one off. I feel like we’ve checked everything else off in between. As a team, we’ve done a great job winning games. We just haven’t won the last one.”

After each postseason disappointment, management explored ways of changing the roster, then made tweaks on the margins. The big-name, high-priced core — Harper, J.T. Realmuto, Aaron Nola, Zack Wheeler, Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos, with Trea Turner joining the group after the World Series run — has been intact for three, going on four years.

Such extreme continuity is uncommon in pro sports in 2025. But if the Seven Stars’ time together once felt infinite, they know they’re likely staring at a deadline. Wheeler will turn 35 in May; Realmuto is 34; Castellanos is 33; Schwarber and Harper are 32; Turner and Nola will be 32 in June.

“We would love to all finish our careers together,” Schwarber recently told Phillies Extra, The Inquirer’s baseball show. “But who would want to come out and watch a bunch of 40-year-old dudes play baseball? Right?”

And even if age wasn’t conspiring against them, Realmuto and Schwarber — along with lefty Ranger Suárez — can be free agents at season’s end. Castellanos’ contract is up after 2026. The Phillies’ 2025 payroll will exceed the highest luxury-tax threshold ($301 million), with the Seven Stars accounting for $182 million of that, for luxury tax purposes.

So, as Harper enters Year 7 with the Phillies — the midpoint of his 13-year, $330 million contract — it’s all but inevitable that this will be the last season with this exact group around him.

“With the present core, in most likelihood, yes,” Dombrowski said. “Not 100 percent. But we have some big free agents at the end of the year. We also have some really good young players coming. So it’s most likely the last chance for the complete club.”

In that case, it’s their last dance for immortality.

“Certainly none of us are getting younger,” Realmuto said. “Time is a real thing, and Father Time is coming for all of us. We don’t have all the time in the world. We want to win together really badly, so there’s a sense of urgency in this, that’s for sure.”

Now or … never?

For each October that passes without a parade down Broad Street, the volume and intensity of the chatter about the Phillies’ “window” is loud enough to drown out even a Renewal By Andersen sales meeting.

Dombrowski doesn’t buy it.

Because as the Phillies’ president of baseball operations sees it, as long as he’s doing the job that owner John Middleton hired him for in December 2020, the names on the roster will change, but the window to win a championship shouldn’t close.

“Personally, it’s exciting because ultimately that’s what you want to do,” Dombrowski said. “You want to be good year in and year out, but then you want to be in a position where you’re able to do that for a long time.”

It was different in Detroit. The Tigers hadn’t won the World Series since 1984 and never under Mike Ilitch’s ownership. By the 2010s, Ilitch, who died in 2017 at age 87, issued a mandate: Spare no expense to win a championship.

“We had an owner who was driven to win, and he was a little older and we totally got it and we gave up some No. 1 draft choices and we did all that throughout the time,” Dombrowski said. “Eventually, that’s going to catch up with you. We knew that. At some point, that window was going to close.”

Middleton, 70, is a passionate owner, with the competitiveness of a former collegiate wrestler and the sensibilities of a sports-talk radio caller. He’s also outspoken about wanting his (darned) World Series trophy back.

But Middleton wants to win more than one title, and his directive to Dombrowski reflects that.

“My challenge to Dave before I hired him,” Middleton said last month, “was win now and win later.”

So, although Dombrowski has spent a lot of Middleton’s cash — $115.5 million for five years of Realmuto; $79 million for four years of Schwarber; $100 million for five years of Castellanos; $300 million for 11 years of Turner; $72 million for four years of Taijuan Walker; $172 million for seven years of Nola — he made an equally sizable investment in the organization’s infrastructure, from the training and conditioning staff to the minor league system.

And as the Phillies restocked the farm, Dombrowski has been protective of the kids. He gets calls on prospects from rival executives who perceive the Phillies as being in a win-now cycle. Thus far, he has hung up on any offers for prized pitcher Andrew Painter, center-field prospect Justin Crawford and shortstop hopeful Aidan Miller, in particular.

They represent the Phillies’ best hope for keeping the window propped open for more than a handful of years. If Painter, Crawford and Miller become prominent major leaguers, the second half of Harper’s contract has a chance to produce contending teams, too.

But Harper would sure love to win with this group first.

“I mean, it’s a great group of guys,” he said. “We love on one another. We understand each other to the max. We’re all family in here. When you’re trying to build something great, you’re trying to do something as a team, you want to do that every year. We’ve gotten to the postseason and done those things, but we haven’t finished the job. The last couple of years should make you hungry to finish that job, no matter who’s in this clubhouse or what’s going on.”

Getting over the hump

In a sport that schedules 162 games in 186 days, winning a division title remains the most impressive team achievement. It requires talent, but also endurance and organizational depth.

The playoffs, meanwhile, are about timing.

“When teams get hot in baseball — same thing with hockey, a team can get hot in hockey and it’s like, ‘Whoa. Watch out for [them],‘ ” Harper said. “We have to win the games that we need to and not let those ones fall through the cracks. I think everything else will take care of itself.”

Maybe. For all of their considerable might, the Dodgers were upset in the divisional round in 2022 and ‘23. They signed Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto and still faced elimination last year after Game 3 of the division series against the Padres before eventually winning the World Series.

“They were on the verge of getting beat,” Dombrowski said. “They didn’t, and everything’s great, but if you just [change] a little bit and they lost, what would be different?”

Only that critics would be lining up to scream that Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and the rest of a nearly $400 million payroll can’t win in October.

It would be easier to question the Phillies’ postseason mettle if not for their World Series run in 2022. But the players who came up short the last two years are the players who shocked the Cardinals, stunned the Braves, vanquished the Padres, and won two of the first three games against the Astros on that unexpected ride three years ago.

Momentum can pinball in a short series. The Phillies hit five homers in Game 3 of the 2022 World Series, then got no-hit in Game 4. They blew out the Diamondbacks in the first two games of the 2023 NLCS, then blew seventh-inning leads in Games 3 and 4.

Last year, everything changed after the Mets rallied for five runs against the Phillies’ bullpen in the eighth inning to spoil a Wheeler gem and steal Game 1 at Citizens Bank Park.

“We haven’t gotten where we feel like we need to be in the playoffs, and we haven’t lived up to the expectations that we hold for ourselves,” Realmuto said. “But it’s not because we don’t have the talent. We know we’re good enough to beat those teams. We proved it last year. We won the season series against the Dodgers. We’ve just got to be able to put it together at the right time.”

In October, it always comes back to timing. The Phillies have one more chance to get it right.

A previous generation of Phillies faced the same challenge. After bowing out in the NLCS in three consecutive years (1976-78) and missing the playoffs in 1979, then-owner Ruly Carpenter issued an ultimatum: Win the World Series, or the roster would be broken up.

The 1980 Phillies won the World Series.

And they’re remembered accordingly.

“I do think this team feels that sense of urgency because we’ve come up short,” said Larry Bowa, the shortstop on that 1980 team and a senior adviser with the Phillies now. “There have been good seasons, as far as wins and losses. But you’ve got to finish the deal, and we have not finished the deal. I would be disappointed if we don’t. You definitely hear the chatter in the clubhouse — ‘Hey, we got to get this done.’ They’re definitely aware of what’s happened here. And I think they want to do something about it. I really do.”

They’ll regret it if they don’t. Take it from Dombrowski.

“This could be one of the greatest time periods in Philadelphia Phillies history,” Dombrowski said. “But in historical perspective, 20 years down the road, that needs to be sealed with the world championship. It’s the way it goes. It’s just how the world works. You do need to put that final cap on it.”

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