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Warming up at Sloan Park on Saturday afternoon before his first start since Game 7 of the World Series, Kyle Hendricks heard it again.

If you don’t know what “it” is, you clearly haven’t been paying attention.

“They were yelling it still,” Hendricks said after throwing two scoreless innings in a 9-3 victory against the Dodgers. “It still hasn’t stopped. I’m like, ‘We’re on the next year, right?’ They’re still (saying): ‘Why did they take you out?’… I don’t get it.”

It has been four months since the Cubs’ Game 7 win, but the expiration date on talking about Hendricks’ shocking removal in the fifth inning appears to be far off.

Everyone believes Hendricks deserved to stay in to finish the fifth — well, almost everyone — and he continues to hear about it.

“Pretty much everybody I run into, that’s one of the first things (they say),” he said.

Some say bringing up the Hendricks and Aroldis Chapman moves that annoyed so many fans before the Cubs finally were able to celebrate that long-sought championship is media-driven. Hendricks knows better. He lived with it all winter.

Everybody he ran into told him he should’ve stayed in. How did Hendricks respond?

“I said, ‘Hey, we won, right? That’s all that matters,'” he said. “I really just tell them I was expecting it to be a short start going into it, which I was. You guys have heard it all before, but to hear it from fans sometimes, it gives you a little reassurance. It’s good that they’re on your side.”

A reporter told Hendricks that Cubs fans even booed the move during the showing of a documentary on the 2016 postseason at a Chicago theater.

“Really?” he said. “It’s die-hard (fans), so you never know what to expect out of them. I love it.”

Hendricks hasn’t changed, but the world around him has since he led the majors in earned-run average the same year he had to fight for a rotation spot in spring training.

“A little weird,” he said. “It’s definitely different from this time last year. Not nearly as much hype for me (in 2016). … Things have changed a little, but it’s all for the good.

“Just trying to keep things simple. It helped over the offseason, dealing with it all, fans everywhere. So coming into spring, we’re used to it. You can see all the young guys really getting used to all the attention.”

Actually the Cubs have been a spring training phenomenon for a while, well before any of the current players were around.

Sammy Sosa started the trend in 1999, the spring he took bows at the plate after hitting a pair of home runs off the Diamondbacks’ Todd Stottlemyre after having watched Japanese players do likewise on a goodwill tour of their country. “Take it back to Japan,” Stottlemyre groused, so the Cubs asked Sosa to stop the tradition before it began.

The Cubs have ruled the Valley since, no matter who wears their uniform. Only a few years ago the organization tried to get the state to impose a “Cubs tax” on all Cactus League games, a ticket surcharge meant to go toward building a new facility.

Then-Commissioner Bud Selig and White Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf quickly nixed the idea, so the Cubs got the city of Mesa to fund it instead. With a winning organization to showcase now, Sloan Park is a gold mine while other teams here draw in the hundreds.

Despite the sellouts and added media attention, which included a visit last week from the “60 Minutes” crew, things have been relatively calm at Camp Maddon.

Cubs President Theo Epstein noted it hasn’t been as crazy as it was during spring training in Fort Myers, Fla., in 2005, after the Red Sox broke the their 86-year title drought.

“I’m surprised,” Epstein said. “I’ll never forget in ’05 we had 5,000 people the first day (of workouts) and 3,000 fans every day, and I was expecting it to be as nuts.

“It’s been refreshingly normal, I think, reflecting the personality of our players, taking everything in stride even with our great success.”

When the new normal includes Cubs fans “taking everything in stride,” you know it’s a crazy world we live in.

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