PHILADELPHIA – Pete Alonso regularly dodges the questions and emphasizes that he focuses on the small rather than the big.

He says he’s looking at the next pitch or the next play instead of the next offseason.

Many people around him will recognize that such myopia is ideal, but virtually impossible.

“The business side will take care of itself, and I have no doubt that it got to him this year,” co-hitting coach Eric Chavez said Thursday in the wake of the most significant turnaround in Alonso’s career. ‘I don’t care what anyone says. I don’t care what he says. It has to be: he’s human.

“The will and desire to create a great year for themselves and for the city, sometimes the will is just too great. But he persevered.”

Alonso was coming off a solid season for others and a below-average year for him at an important time in his life, ready to walk free after the season.

If he carried that weight during a campaign in which he played all 162 games but hit .240 with a .788 OPS and 34 home runs, he didn’t admit it.

His platform season didn’t launch him into another stratosphere of MLB money-makers like Aaron Judge’s 2022 season did.

Or at least: Alonso has not yet made that leap.

Alonso mostly struggled in clutch situations all season, hitting .232 with runners in scoring position and posting just a .525 OPS in late and close moments – mainly defined as the seventh inning or later when the team’s the batter is behind by three runs. or less, equal or one point ahead.

He just didn’t have enough big hits and then got absolution in the most gigantic moment of his career.

Alonso’s three-run home run with one out in the ninth inning in Milwaukee, which effectively put a stop to all the Mets’ holiday plans and ensured they would be at Citizens Bank Park on Saturday for the start of the NLDS, was perhaps the biggest swing of the Mets history and that was certainly in Alonso history.

The home run gave Alonso one more series in a Mets uniform, at least one more home game at Citi Field and another chance at finding a sensational payday on the open market.

“At the end of the day,” Francisco Lindor said in the festive clubhouse, “if Pete does this in the postseason, he gets paid.”

The opportunity is once again for Alonso, who grabbed it on Thursday.

He’s a powerful and capable bat, but he didn’t declare himself an indispensable bat during his subpar regular season.

What if, after putting the Mets on his back once, he does it again in the NLDS?

NLCS?

World series?

“He knows he’s one of the best hitters in the world,” Chavez said. “(This regular season was) not ideal for him or anything, but everything is going to change for him in the future.

‘Hopefully he slams the door on this whole thing – who cares what happened this year? Now it’s about what he does during his at-bats over the next two or three weeks.”