Since adver­si­ty often reveals the true nature of someone’s char­ac­ter, it should also do the same for an NFL team.

Los­ing sev­en con­sec­u­tive games, as the Mia­mi Dol­phins did in the first half of this sea­son, pro­duced a pre­dictable narrative.

Miami’s NFL team was trash! Pathetic!

The play­ers and coach­es were all horrible.

The Dol­phins need­ed to flush every­thing and start over — again.

That’s what peo­ple out­side the Dol­phins’ Mia­mi Gar­dens facil­i­ty con­clud­ed. Hell, the team spent weeks pur­su­ing trou­bled Tex­ans quar­ter­back Deshaun Wat­son before October’s trade dead­line, pos­si­bly because of the per­cep­tion that the 2021 sea­son wasn’t salvageable.

Yet, it was.

Win­ning sev­en straight games in the sec­ond half of the sea­son — becom­ing the first fran­chise in NFL his­to­ry to win sev­en straight games after los­ing sev­en straight — was the foot­ball equiv­a­lent of a comatose patient wak­ing up.

Yet, after Miami’s 20–3 win over the New Orleans Saints, which put the Dol­phins at 8–7 on the sea­son and in pos­ses­sion of the sev­enth and final wild-card spot in the AFC, the nation­al media’s response to this turn­around is a bit of a head-scratcher.

“The great pre­tenders,” ESPN ana­lyst Mar­cus Spears called the Dol­phins on Tues­day morn­ing when talk­ing about the team’s play­off chances, which the sports net­work pre­dict­ed to be 22%.

Spears’ sen­ti­ment was echoed all morn­ing by the nation­al talk­ing heads — no mat­ter the net­work — who don’t believe in Bri­an Flo­res’ team, for what­ev­er reason.

“This team stuck togeth­er the entire year. We dealt with a lot of adver­si­ty ear­ly in the year, and it revealed a lot. Revealed the char­ac­ter of the guys in the lock­er room,” Flo­res said. “Some peo­ple were with you, and some peo­ple were on the fence.”

And plen­ty clear­ly still are.

Maybe the fence rid­ing has to do with the cal­iber of oppo­nents the Dol­phins have beat­en — only the Bal­ti­more Ravens own a win­ning record — dur­ing the sev­en straight wins.

Or the qual­i­ty of quar­ter­backs — most­ly back­ups like New Orleans’ Ian Book, the Saint’s fourth-string quar­ter­back, and has-beens (Joe Flac­co and Cam New­ton) — Mia­mi has faced dur­ing the wins, because of injury and COVID-19 absences.

Still, that hasn’t stopped oth­er play­off con­tenders from suf­fer­ing tough loss­es (see the Los Ange­les Charg­ers, who got slapped up by a Davis Mills-led Tex­ans team in last Sunday’s 41–29 loss) in sim­i­lar high-stakes games.

And nobody ever men­tions that the Dol­phins played five games with­out start­ing quar­ter­back Tua Tago­v­ailoa, and oth­er weeks and months with­out key play­ers like cen­ter Michael Deit­er and Raek­won Davis, the team’s top run-stuffer, dur­ing the bulk of those ear­ly losses.

Dur­ing the rebound, the Dol­phins have become a scrap­py and resilient NFL team, one that plays to the cal­iber of its oppo­nents usu­al­ly (loss­es to Tam­pa Bay Buc­ca­neers and the Buf­fa­lo Bills are the excep­tion), and one that has improved as the sea­son has progressed.

And it’s all a byprod­uct of the Dol­phins’ com­mit­ment to play­ing a self­less brand of team foot­ball and devel­op­ing a locked-in focus on each week, each opponent.

“We just stayed the course through­out the whole sea­son. We didn’t go weary,” Dol­phins defen­sive line­man Chris­t­ian Wilkins said. “We stuck with the program.”

Tagovailoa’s pock­et pres­ence and quick deci­sions have masked how bad the offen­sive line has been this season.

Miami’s com­mit­ment to the rush­ing attack, which has aver­aged 30 attempts per game dur­ing the sev­en con­sec­u­tive wins despite the team’s dis­mal 3.4 yards per attempt aver­age, has cre­at­ed a bal­anced iden­ti­ty on offense.

And the defense has got­ten back to its aggres­sive style of play from the 2020 sea­son, which has this year’s unit lead­ing the NFL with 45 sacks.

“Play your tech­nique and do your job,” said defen­sive line­man Zach Siel­er, one of the team’s many unsung heroes.

What hap­pens in the final two games — Sunday’s road game against the Ryan Tan­nehill-led Ten­nessee Titans (10–5) and a home finale against Bill Belichick and the New Eng­land Patri­ots (9–6) — is hard to predict.

The stakes have been raised, and we’ll learn how Flo­res’ team han­dles that pres­sure. But the one thing we know is that the Dol­phins deserve to be here because of their resilien­cy, and they are wor­thy of respect, which like­ly won’t come unless they lock down that wild-card spot, punch­ing the franchise’s first tick­et to the post­sea­son since the 2016 season.

“We believe in each oth­er,” Flo­res said. “At the end of the day that is all that matters.”