Time warp

That gait. That purposeful, metronomic, Mister Roboto gait.

Years flaked away Sunday like paint or rust or brittle parchment as Tiger Woods strolled among the flowers and greenery of the garden that is Augusta National. Suddenly it was 2005 again, and everyone was in Tiger cringe mode. Dubya was in the White House. Donald J. "Donny" Trump was just another meathead who was born on third and thought he hit a triple. No one had yet heard of Steph or K.D. or Danica -- or, for that matter, Rory or Rickie or D.J.

And yet here was Tiger Woods, then as now, strolling the grounds wearing his Red Shirt of Doom. Same measured, tempo-conscious stride. Same death-machine stare. Same iron, unblinking tunnel vision, as everyone around him blinked and blinked again.

It was all vintage Tiger. And, of course, it was not.

Fourteen years have passed since he last did what he did yesterday, and if it was time in a bottle there were some marked differences. He's not 29 but 43 now, and it's a damaged 43. Since he last won a major championship 11 years ago, there have been neck injuries and knee and Achilles injuries and four back surgeries and serious doubts he would ever walk again, let alone play golf.

He himself among the doubters. Only two years ago, he needed nerve blockers just to sit in a chair for any length of time, and was privately conceding he was done. And yet, one year later, he was in the mix on Sunday in not one but two majors. Won a tournament in Atlanta. And finished 2018 by winning the Tour Championship.

It was, by any measure, an astonishing comeback, even for the greatest golfer of his generation. And it needed only one last piece to make it complete.

Sunday, it finally came, at a place where only one older player had ever won. It came in a way it had never come for Woods in winning14 other majors -- coming from behind on a Sunday -- and against younger, outrageously talented men who'd only heard stories about the Tiger Woods who so pitilessly crushed anyone who dared challenge him.

Well. They are stories no more.

Francesco Molinari -- the stoic Italian who led after 54 holes, and perhaps the best player in the world over the last year -- unaccountably went swimming at 12  and 15 and was out of it. Brooks Koepka, the bland automaton who had won three of the last six majors and never seemed to let anything faze him, missed badly on a short birdie putt at 18 that, it turns out, would have forced a playoff. Others were too far back, or inevitably gave way.

Tiger, meanwhile, kept being Tiger, reaching back once again to another time. Once he had the thing in his sights, it was over, as it had been 14 times before in a vastly different reality. He slammed the door as emphatically as he ever had.

And in so doing, made yesterday the most memorable Sunday at the Masters since 46-year-old Jack Nicklaus climbed out of his rocker in '86 to steal his sixth green jacket with a closing 65. But because we live in that kind of time, it was almost immediately subject to hyperbole.

On one end of the pendulum, people were saying it was the culmination of the greatest comeback in the history of sports. Yet it might not have been the greatest comeback even in golf. That crown probably still belongs to Ben Hogan, who won the 1950 U.S. Open despite being barely able to walk after a near-fatal head-on collision with a Greyhound bus little more than a year prior.

And on the other end of the pendulum?

On the other end were those who immediately downplayed it because, after all, this was a guy who'd already won 14 majors and was clearly ready to win another. Everything that happened between 2008 and Woods' re-emergence in 2018 was irrelevant, because it was only a few injuries.

Which is a little like saying the Miracle on Ice wasn't really a miracle because the Russians just didn't play well that day.

The truth is somewhere in the middle, and that truth includes the notion that golf was the real winner of the weekend. No one moves the needle like Tiger, or ever has since the days of Arnie's Army. Even at 43, he's the man. As Koepke said yesterday, there's no roar like a Tiger roar when the man is closing in on another major.

For the first time in 14 years, that roar went up to the sky at Augusta yesterday. And no matter what you think of that, lucky us.