After a 14-inning game like Wednesday when we didn’t get back to our rooms until 1 a.m. and then had to play a day game Thursday, you don’t really feel it until after the next game. That’s when you’re more exhausted.

The game was a long one and you grind and when it’s extra innings it’s more of a grind. When the pressure is higher it seems like it takes more energy out of you.

But it wasn’t as if the loss took any more out of us. Every loss is bad. And the great thing about baseball is that there isn’t one play that can lose you a game. It seems like it at the moment, like Wednesday when Ryan Church and Ryan Langerhans ran into each other and it seemed like that let Philly back into the game. But there were five or six situations where we could have gotten a hit and scored another run so that play wouldn’t have mattered.

Players understand that because we’ve all been through it before. That’s the best thing about having team chemistry and that’s why we’re reluctant to yell at people or blame them. That’s how you handle it and you move on.

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After Thursday’s game I was a little exhausted. It’s almost like if you’re not playing a sport all the time and then you go out on the weekend and play with your buddies — you do something you’re not accustomed to doing — and you’re sore and achy.

But you fight through it, just like you grind your way through August. It’s always the longest month of the season. In July you’ve got the All-Star break and in September you’ve got the callups so you have fresh faces to liven things up a little bit. Plus the end is nearing or you’re in a playoff race.

In August, you just try to do the same things and break it down into individual weeks. That makes it go a little bit quicker. But I never hit any so-called wall during a season.

It helps that we’re playing in New York this weekend — but four games in three days is tough. But it’s a fun city. It would be fun to play there — if you don’t want that kind of pressure then you’re in the wrong line of business. It’s fun to have everyone watching your every move on the field. The tough part about the city is when you get superstars like Alex Rodriguez and some guys on the Mets like David Wright or Jose Reyes and the media doesn’t leave you alone when you leave the field either. It takes a different person to handle both kinds of attention.

But that’s why I love Washington. It’s as close to New York as you’ll get and when we get that new stadium and start spending some money and start winning, then it will be like New York without all the hassle.

As told to The Examiner’s John Keim.

Nats third baseman Ryan Zimmerman is one of baseball’s rising stars and, at 22, the face of the franchise. Now he’ll share his thoughts with The Examiner’s readers each week throughout the baseball season.