Here is what Don Mattingly said one Spring Training morning in Jupiter, Fla., when it was all ahead of him with the Marlins and he was talking about the “clean slate” he’d been given by his boss -- another former captain of the Yankees you may have heard of named Derek Jeter.

"In the bottom of my heart, I believe I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, and that we're going to end up exactly where we want to be," said Mattingly.

Now here is where Mattingly’s team is with one week left in the short regular season: Second place in the National League East, three games behind the Braves with four games left against them starting Monday night. After that, the Marlins finish up with three games against the Yankees. Maybe it figures that the story for Mattingly’s team will play out at Yankee Stadium. He never played there. He played across the street, where he was the one great Yankee -- because of bad timing -- to never play in the World Series. They still called him Donnie Baseball there. Now Donnie Baseball ought to be as much of a favorite for NL Manager of the Year, just for the Marlins being where they are.

Mattingly sat next to Joe Torre at the old Yankee Stadium after he retired, and then he managed the Dodgers to first place in the NL West three times, even though he never made it to the Series with them, either. Now he is with the Marlins. There was some question, with his contract expiring and the Marlins on their way to losing 105 games in 2019, if Mattingly would be rehired. He was. It was one year ago on Sunday that Jeter signed him a two-year extension with the team, with a mutual option for 2022. Good thing.

“[Mattingly] believes in our vision,” Jeter said in September 2019. “He’s all in.”

The Marlins come into the last week of the regular season ahead of the defending champion Nationals in their division, ahead of the Mets, still ahead of the Phillies. The Marlins were barely out of the first week of the season when they had 17 members of the team test positive for COVID-19. They had seven games postponed at the time. It set up a stretch like the one they just had, one in which they played 15 games in a grueling 11-day homestand. And yet here they are.

There have been other fine managing jobs done in baseball since the short season began in the last week of July: Rick Renteria and David Ross in Chicago; Mike Shildt in St. Louis, after all the scheduling disruptions the Cardinals had because of COVID-19; Kevin Cash with the Rays and Dave Roberts with the Dodgers; and Gabe Kapler with the Giants, after their sketchy start. No one has done better, and with such a young team, than Mattingly has. No team has been more of a surprise than his has been.

The Marlins still might not make it to the postseason just because of the schedule, which starts with four against the Braves, who beat the Marlins 29-9 just 11 days ago. The Marlins have been at the wrong end of some blowouts, you bet. They played one last doubleheader against the Nationals on Sunday and in the second game got beat, 15-0. You know what they did in the first game? Beat Max Scherzer, 2-1. That one ended with Brandon Kintzler, their closer, getting out of a bases-loaded jam in the last inning. The Marlins keep coming. This was the season in which we were told that everybody had a chance. Nobody was sure that “everybody” included the Marlins. It did.

When he got to Miami, and before Jeter took over and began his rebuild -- a rebuild that included trading National League MVP Giancarlo Stanton and the 59 home runs he hit in 2017 -- Mattingly’s first Marlins team went 79-82 and he finished fifth in NL Manager of the Year voting. Then came 2018 and ’19, when the Marlins lost a combined 203 games. Sometimes the manager who goes through a couple of seasons like that doesn’t get to finish the job. Mattingly has gotten that chance from Jeter. And has done some job this season.

“Every game you've got to battle,” he said Sunday after the split with the Nationals. “You've got to keep putting games behind you, good or bad.”

No one has a tougher road than the Marlins do this week. First those four games against the first-place Braves (against whom they’re 3-3 this season). Then they get the Yankees, who have been the hottest team in baseball, just having their 10-game winning streak ended by the Red Sox on Sunday afternoon.

The Marlins are playing big games in September. They even still have an outside shot at winning their division. Still grinding. So is their manager. Raise a hand if you saw any of this coming in South Florida.