The other post-season.

Elvis and Mitch and Derek were there in 2007, and so was a 16-year-old named Martin.

So were Danny Clark and Josue Perez and Keith Comstock and Napoleon Pichardo, and I’m sure Mike Daly and Kip Fagg were in and out for more than the four days I spent in Surprise for Fall Instructs that October.

I went to Surprise that year because I wanted to check out all the new minor league talent the Rangers had added that summer through trades (Andrus, Matt Harrison, Neftali Feliz, Engel Beltre, Max Ramirez) and the draft (Moreland, Holland, Tommy Hunter, Neil Ramirez, Julio Borbon, Blake Beavan, Michael Main) and internationally (Perez, Tomas Telis, Leury Garcia).

I went in October because, at that time in Rangers history, baseball was predictably finished for the year.

I’ve been back to Instructs every fall since, but starting in 2010 I’ve made it a point to get out there in late September, to make sure I’d be back home in time for 162+.

If I didn’t write about watching the last three games of the 2012 season on a TV in Surprise with a bunch of Rangers instructors and scouts, it’s because it was too painful to talk about. As emotionally invested as I was in those brutal three games in Oakland, it obviously went way beyond that for the men who grind it out on the back fields and on the road for more hours and more days each year than most people probably think, because every mass infield on a 109-degree afternoon in Arizona and every 6:45 am turn in the cages and every clubhouse classroom session is done, ultimately, so that the big league team has its best chance, every year, to play ball when most other teams have gone home for the year.

Watching the Texas Rangers push for playoff baseball has to mean something extra to those guys that most of us can’t fully wrap our heads around.

Three mornings ago a team of Rangers prospects faced a team of Royals prospects on Field 1, and when Chris Garia cut a runner down at the plate from center field I won’t swear I wasn’t shaken from a daydream that those same two organizations could find themselves teeing it up on a little bigger stage in a couple weeks.

That night a bunch of us sat around that same TV as in 2012 — this time including a former nine-year big league infielder-outfielder, a former outfielder who got as close to a big league call as you can get, a onetime infielder on two NCAA champions, and an ex-college pitcher and college coach — calling pitches and calling pitching changes, sweating a fairly shaky Yovani Gallardo start but treated to Choo and Fielder and 4.1 lockdown frames out of the bullpen.

Every player who suited up in blue for Texas 6, Houston 2 on Friday probably had a turn or two at Instructs at the start of his own career, if not in Surprise then somewhere else, and many who fit in that category (Fielder, Sam Dyson, Jake Diekman, Mike Napoli, Will Venable) are here in part because of someone else the Rangers developed on the back fields when the scoreboards were off, the concession stands were shut down, and the press wasn’t around.

The next morning — like a dozen mornings before it and twice as many yet to come — more than 70 ballplayers and dozens of instructors focused on the little things and the bigger ones, putting in tons of hours in unnatural heat to get better at baseball.

And to help ensure that the Texas Rangers are a franchise that continues to play games in late September that mean everything.

Pitchers’ target competitions. Fungoes to simulate short-hop throws on steal attempts. Four-corners catcher drills. Hockey pucks and footballs. Rehabbing pitchers, putting in their own grind. Options-decisions-consequences, and 18 inches: head to heart.

A thousand swings and a thousand throws.

That final week in 2012, the thought that Jurickson Profar would be in Surprise as the final week in 2015 unfolded wouldn’t have made any sense, but there he was, swinging the bat from both sides without limitation, even if he’s not throwing at 100 percent yet.

Profar’s still just 22. But that’s four and a half years older than Chad Smith, a left-left outfielder (fifth round in June) who along with fellow outfielder Eric Jenkins (second round in June) probably opened my eyes as much as anyone did this weekend.

Another 17-year-old, righthander Tyler Phillips (16th round in June), was on a short list of the guys I wanted to see, but he was shockingly summoned to Houston (along with righthander Cole Wiper) to throw early batting practice to Josh Hamilton, Joey Gallo, and a few others.

They’re presumably back in Surprise now, and every minute Phillips spends around Clark, and every rep Smith puts in with Perez, and every chance any player on the back fields in Arizona gets to be around Kenny Holmberg and Corey Ragsdale and Roy Silver, there’s a chance to make themselves better, and to make the Texas Rangers better.

They’re back in Surprise, and I’m back home, as are the Rangers, about to host Detroit for three and the Angels for four, while Houston takes its terrible road record to Seattle and Arizona for three each and the surging Angels host Oakland for three before coming to Texas to round out their own effort to extend the season.

The last two days in Houston have made this next week more critical for the Rangers than it might have been otherwise, and that’s OK. Texas won a healthy four of six on the road trip to Oakland and Houston, and with a 2.5-game lead in the division and a Magic Number of 5 to secure a playoff position — and with Cole Hamels and Colby Lewis set to start four of these remaining seven games — if the Rangers somehow don’t manage to reach 162+, if the position they’re now in isn’t enough to move on, then 2015 has been a blast and bring on 2016.

But it will be enough.

It will.

There will be late nights four of these next five, as Rangers games will give way to West Coast Astros and/or Angels games that will bear watching.

Meanwhile, there will be very, very early days in Surprise, this week and a couple more, for players who have never so much as met Adrian Beltre or Rougned Odor or Colby Lewis and maybe never will.

But you can bet there’s a plan in place for 100 players and coaches in Surprise to be around a TV next week when the Rangers are playing post-season baseball, as a reward and as an incentive, and knowing how the guys in charge down there are wired, even as they’re living and dying with every Rangers playoff pitch — on a level most of us can probably only try to imagine — there will be, here and there, an added moment of instruction that will stick with some kid destined to help this franchise continue, for years down the road, to win.