KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Since the advent of the Patrick Mahomes Era, the Chiefs are 15-3 in the postseason — a diametric contrast for a franchise that had won just one of its previous 12 playoff games and tormented its fan base into what might be called rational paranoia.

In this astonishing span, the Chiefs have played in four of the last five Super Bowls, won three of them and are embarked on a quest to become the first to win three in a row as they enter this postseason.

With all that has come the burden of being envied and targeted as the marquee foe for every single regular-season opponent in recent years — a fact that makes it all the more amazing that they were 15-1 this season before the immaterial fiasco in Denver last weekend.

But something else has been cultivated in the process of essentially playing a full extra season in the last six years: a prevailing psychological edge that should gird them for the playoffs in a way no other current NFL team can know.

It’s not just that any team they could play, whether one they haven’t seen in the postseason in eons or, say, Buffalo, has to wonder what it will take to beat them in the playoffs.

A 24-0 first-half lead, the Texans discovered, wasn’t enough to sustain them until halftime five years ago in a postseason marked by the unprecedented NFL playoff feat of overcoming three straight double-digit deficits on the way to winning the Super Bowl.

Going ahead 36-33 with 13 seconds left wasn’t adequate for the Bills three years ago.

Neither was lining up for a game-tying 44-yard field-goal attempt with 1 minute, 47 seconds left last season in Buffalo against the Bills — who, just as in the 2021 season, had beaten the Chiefs in a preliminary meeting only to have that do them zero good when it counted most.

But the point is less about whether and how the Chiefs might reside in the heads of their upcoming opponents until some team snaps what can be called the longest winning streak (seven) in NFL postseason history.

(Albeit with a caveat: That’s in terms of seasons consecutively connected; the Patriots had a 10-game postseason winning streak from 2001-05 but didn’t make the playoffs in 2002; the Packers had a nine-game streak from 1961-67 but missed the 1963 and 1964 playoffs.)

The point is about what we might well suppose fills their own minds: the cultural right stuff that has informed and perpetuated how they’ve kept coming through in the crucible, as so often embodied in Mahomes’ uncanny knack for clutch play.

“A pressure advantage would be the best way that I would describe it …” Chiefs safety Justin Reid told The Kansas City Star by his locker a few weeks ago. “We’ve been in enough high-pressure situations that high-pressure situations don’t cause us to break.

“We know how to thrive in those situations.”

There are ample reasons the Chiefs by now in the playoffs seemingly can count on that extra armor — an advantage that figures to be all the more dynamic with the benefit of the extended rest and time that coach Andy Reid has so prospered by in his career.

The most obvious element of that is hidden in plain view.

It’s no coincidence that a team that week after week after week grappled to win played at its most sound and efficient in the final two games of the three in 11 days culminating with a 29-10 win at Pittsburgh on Christmas Day.

“Knowing what we’re chasing, that we’re so close to it with the playoffs right around the corner … everyone is just at a higher level of execution,” Justin Reid said, later adding, “We’re always trying to play our best, but we’re not expecting to be at our best (early in the season). … That’s because throughout the regular season, we’re intentional about developing guys.”

With that comes more trust and better chemistry and cohesion. And that feeds into an established identity. Maybe something like a collective soul that perhaps has another intangible aspect to it beyond talent, confidence, poise and resilience:

A certain emotional reservoir subconsciously conserved during the regular season to be deployed when it counts ... starting with opening the postseason on Jan. 18 or 19 at GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium.

Without being directly in their minds or, say, being their sports psychologist, there’s no real way to know to what degree that might be part of their makeup.

But at least in a general way, the notion of a sort of intuitive pacing has some traction beyond the way my friend, renowned author (including the definitive biography of Lamar Hunt and tale of the 1969 Chiefs) and forever Chiefs fan Michael MacCambridge conceived a few weeks ago.

Here’s how he summed up the theory about a team most defined by being dominant as it faces the greatest trials:

“As a defending champion, and especially as a two-time defending champion, they are aware that they are going to get every team’s best shot,” he elaborated Thursday. “Their effort, week in and week out, is more modulated, more consistent than most NFL teams.

“There is this ineffable sense that they’re not going to overextend themselves in any game. That leads to fewer blowout wins, but it has also led this season to an absurd number of close wins. Of course they’ve been fortunate, but their ability to stay in games has allowed for that good fortune.”

Most to the theoretical point now: By keeping those games in perspective as a means to an end, the Chiefs stayed level and didn’t waste emotion or energy to get to this point.

If the idea sounds far-fetched, it happens that the general concept is entirely valid — even if there’s also no way to measure it and it’s only worthy until it expires.

Noting he couldn’t speak to how much the Chiefs might be experiencing this because he doesn’t work with them, Murray State psychology professor Dan Wann spoke to the broader point.

While stressing that he’s not a physiological psychologist, Wann said he knows enough about brain power and our nervous systems to say it makes sense that people “save up their resources, in awareness or out of their awareness, for when they’re most critical.”

In this case, the prospect struck him as similar to the idea of working smarter instead of harder.

“I do think that for teams like the Chiefs, and you can think of other teams from other leagues where this has been the case, that they’ve got enough experience to know that there’s two seasons,” said Wann, an ardent Chiefs fan who went to Shawnee Mission North High. “There’s the season that gets you to the dance, and then what you do at the dance, right?

“To way that, ‘Well, they’re going to hold back for the playoffs,’ I don’t know about that. But at the same time, I think that they understand when the urgency occurs.”

By way of example, and with a laugh, he thought about a Journey concert at Kemper Arena back in the 1980s, when the band looked like it was about to die near the end ... and then came out blazing for an encore.

He thought about George Brett vs. Goose Gossage, and NBA players with way more energy in May than February.

And he pointed to a defender intercepting the ball with an entirely open field in front of him and slowing into the end zone when he’s beyond being chased down.

“They dial it down; as a matter of fact, some dial it down so much they drop the football on the 1-yard-line,” he said. “People know (intuitively) that they don’t want to expend resources that they don’t necessarily have to. …

“I can’t speak to the fact if it’s a thing for the Chiefs right now or not. But it’s obviously a thing.”

Likewise, University of Western Kentucky psychology professor Rick Grieve was careful not to suggest direct knowledge of how this could be a factor for the Chiefs but added, “I can see how it could kind of be in play here.”

Just like teams at times tend to play down to their competition, it follows that they’re less fired up when it means less no matter how hard they try to be fully engaged.

At the minimum, Grieve said, a team with the Chiefs’ abundance of recent postseason success could figure to have “that cognitive capacity to understand what we need to do to make it through to the next level.”

And then?

“I don’t want to say (they would be) paying more attention, but being more mindful of the little … details,” he said, later adding, “I hate to say it, but (human nature is to) focus a little more because it means a little more ...

“This is not their first rodeo. So I think the players that have been through this before, been through this experience before, know what needs to happen to get there again.”

If so, Grieve noted, maybe it’s less subconscious or unconscious and not necessarily an urge or a drive but simply a matter of experience: “ ‘We understand what points we need to hit and when we need to hit them.’ ”

Now, it also bears mention that all of this is fun to ponder and intriguing right up to the point where it no longer may be affirmed by results, which could be any time at all.

And Chiefs guard Trey Smith was just as right when he rejected the notion of any postseason advantage whatsoever.

Experience, he said, is an overrated stat for the playoffs. Even if the core of the team has “a really competitive nature and we have a guy named Patrick Mahomes,” he said, the Chiefs have to know they could lose on any given day and go earn everything.

Moreover, Wann reminded, there’s a fine line between motivation and pressure. Just the same, the Chiefs one way or another and overall are uniquely steeled for this.

And that’s a trait that figures to serve them well.

“There’s a difference between ‘I think I can’ and ‘I know I can,’ ” Wann said. “The Chiefs more than any other team in the NFL have the ‘I know I can’ and confidence.

“With confidence comes success. There’s no better predictor of success than confidence. And the beauty of it is, there’s no better predictor of confidence than success.”

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