CHICAGO — The Milwaukee Brewers have been the darlings of baseball – and the talk of the sport.

That’ll happen when you rattle off a whopping 14-game winning streak and are 53-17 over your previous 70 games. So, can the Cubs separate the competitor in them and at least appreciate the remarkable run they’ve been on?

“What’s so great about it?” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said on Saturday when he was asked about their streak. “I mean, they’re playing good. They’re playing great. They haven’t lost since we played them.”

Indeed, the Cubs salvaged the series finale at American Family Fields 10-3 on July 30, keeping them a game behind their northern neighbors. The heater the Brewers went on, coupled with a 7-8 stretch by the Cubs, has made their deficit in the National League Central eight games. That’s after the Cubs’ 4-3 win over the Pittsburgh Pirates on Sunday and the Brewers’ 3-2 loss to the Cincinnati Reds in extra innings.

“It’s tough,” Dansby Swanson said. “It’s kind of in your face, in a way. They’ve been doing some pretty incredible things over there, just the consistency and finding ways to win each and every day.”

The Cubs have preached for about a month and a half now, the importance of focusing on themselves and not worrying about what Milwaukee is doing. They can’t shake up anything Milwaukee is doing by scoreboard watching.

“We only get 13 chances to affect it, though, right?” Counsell said. “That’s, that’s how many chances we get to affect it.”

The biggest will come over the next four days, when they play them five times. It’s almost wild to call a series in the middle of August season-defining, but that’s what it is, given the nature of the calendar. It’s the last time both teams will play each other, and a five-game or three-game deficit with 34 games to play looks better than one of seven or more games.

That’s the position Milwaukee’s run has put the Cubs in. That’s what’s made it annoying for the Cubs.

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“Well, the job is to try to win the division,” Counsell said. “That’s the ultimate goal, and they’re really making that difficult. So from that perspective, yeah [it’s annoying].”

How do the Cubs approach this pivotal series of games, then?

“Just like we’ve been doing, right?” Swanson said. “You just show up and you got 27 outs or more maybe, for the first one, and then you show up and do it again later in the evening, and then you take each day for what it’s worth.

“You go out there and find ways to contribute and play winning baseball, and you just trust that that process is going to work in the end.”

You can’t try to win five games in one day – er, in Monday’s case, one afternoon.

“I think that’s probably the hardest part of a one-two series like this, something that has a lot of attention and is obviously going to be a great atmosphere,” Ian Happ said. “I think you have to do the little things right.

“They’re a good team. They play fundamental baseball, they run the bases well, they play defense well, they pitch it. And so, for us, we have to go out and play our game and be really sound fundamental and get the first one first.”

That approach has led the Cubs to a 70-53 record, the fifth-best mark in baseball. Even during the Brewers’ insane 53-17 stretch since Memorial Day weekend, the Cubs are a respectable 39-32, the sixth-best winning percentage. The Cubs haven’t been terrible; the Brewers have just been historic.

But, while the Cubs’ hopes of winning the division will take a massive turn in the next four days, they know they still have a golden opportunity to reach the playoffs and host the three-game Wild Card series.

“That’s the next goal, right?” Counsell said. “The Wild Card series is a three-game series for seeds 3 through 6. You get the advantage of being at home if you’re the top seed.

“Otherwise, you’re on the road. But a three-game series is a three-game series. We know what can happen in a three-game series. You want it to be at home, but I’m not sure it matters in the playoffs. It matters, but it’s small. That’s what history tells us, at least.”