They’re ruthless. That’s all you can say. Because here, in the best locker room in sports, after showing how many light years the Dolphins are away from mattering, the New England Patriots didn’t want to talk about it.

None of it. Not their 15-0 record. Not the chance of running the table. Not how they dismantled the Dolphins on Sunday, as expected, while adding to the pain by taking a wrecking ball to some of the most cherished records in Dolphins history.

The 1984 team’s NFL record of 70 touchdowns in a season? Gone.

The 1972 team’s 14-0 record for consecutive wins in a regular season? Gone.

Yet here was the message seeping from the locker of the biggest Patriots: They weren’t good enough.

“We’ve got to get better than that,” linebacker Tedy Bruschi said.

“We’re not there yet,” linebacker Junior Seau said.

“We’ve got to finish better in games like this,” safety Rodney Harrison said.

“We can be happy with the win. We can’t be happy with how we finished.”

They led 28-0 at the half Sunday. They’ve outscored the Dolphins 70-7 in first halves this season. I don’t know about you, but the games looked finished to me at that point.

“You know what that tells me?” Harrison said.

“If we’re up 70-7 in the halves, that tells me we got outplayed in the second halves. What were the scores in the second half?”

Dolphins 28, Patriots 7.

“Like I said, we’ve got to finish better,” he said.

These days, figuring just what makes this team tick is a cottage industry, examined closely by sports writers and business leaders. Is it as simple as assembled talent? Is it Bill Belichick’s system? Is it quarterback Tom Brady being plucked from a draft haystack?

Of course, it’s all that mixed into this culture of nothing’s good enough. You can’t start laying off in the second half of blowouts if you want to be the greatest team in NFL history.

And, make no mistake, they want history. They want legacy.

And who thinks they won’t get it?

Here’s a story that tells of these Patriots: With the Dolphins, Wes Welker always was the first player on the practice field. Always. He was 15 minutes early every day. Some of that would be spent stretching and warming up on his own. Some would be spent working on his punt catching and returning.

“Here, I go out early, and sometimes I’m not the first one,” he said. “Sometimes there’s a handful of guys already out there.

“Guys showing up early to practice, finishing weight workouts, doing little things on their own – there’s something to that.”

You saw Sunday this mountain the Dolphins have to scale. Their constant instability compared to the Patriots. Their undernourished roster. And does Belichick or Brady ever mismanage a situation like the Dolphins do weekly?

It meant nothing to Sunday, but coach Cam Cameron provided another head scratcher by having Cleo Lemon spike the ball with 71 seconds left before the half. They had plenty of time. They needed that down, as it turned out.

And yet there was Cameron saying that was fine while the Patriots are saying they had to improve. This isn’t throwing darts. Maybe, just maybe, Cameron was taking the blame. But if you ever wondered what drives the Patriots, you saw it in the locker room Sunday.

“The veterans here keep telling us young guys this team’s done nothing yet,” said fullback Kyle Eckle, the former Dolphin.