Nine years ago to the day since Rory McIlroy kissed the Claret Jug in front of a bank of photographers on the 18th green at Hoylake, he will tee it up in the first round of the 151st Open on this unusually flat piece of linksland in affluent suburban Liverpool, searching for something he seemed to have in abundance that Sunday evening in 2014.
Major championship victories, some by big margins, became almost an annual occurrence for him in his early to mid 2000's after US Open and USPGA triumphs, each by eight shots, over the previous three years.
But there were signs, even on that damp grey weekend, that such landslide successes were about to become more rare.
The trophy engraver may well have started his preparatory work on the silverware after McIlroy birdied the first hole on Sunday, leaving him with seven shots to spare over the field.
But there followed a few front-nine bogeys, while a run from behind by Sergio Garcia closed the gap to two strokes by the time McIlroy reached the back nine.
From there, it was a far more heavily gritted road to victory and it required a pluckily retrieved par-save on 17 to preserve that lead, which allowed him the luxury of enjoying the walk down 18.
It had been harder than he might have expected, but in achieving a lifelong goal he had also made notable history beyond simply winning golf’s oldest and most historic title.
At 25, McIlroy had become the third-youngest man to have claimed three of the world’s four majors.
He was beginning to be bracketed in the same pantheon of greats as the only other two players to have achieved that accolade, Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus.
That notion was only reinforced by the addition of a fourth major title to his trophy cabinet less than a month later at the USPGA Championship in Kentucky.
But that was back then and there are now new realities after a winless streak in the majors stretching all the way back to that summer of 2014.
So, this week McIlroy is back at Royal Liverpool seeking to channel whatever positive vibes he can summon from this happy place, thereby setting his career on an amended path to at least a version of the greatness that seemed to be his destiny after leaving the Wirral peninsula nine years ago.
His game could hardly be in better shape. His lifelong coach Michael Bannon has been walking the fairways this week with little to do, other than just make sure that nothing untoward creeps into the graceful, powerful move through the ball that seemed to be as well-oiled as ever during most of his Scottish Open winning performance last week.
The manner of that success, with birdies made on the final two holes in a 15-20 mile an hour wind, is what McIlroy referred to this week as possibly significant to his challenge at Hoylake.
"I certainly feel like the win in Scotland was validation for the good stuff I’ve been doing over the last couple of months," he said in an interview with RTÉ Sport on Tuesday.
"I had great chances to win tournaments - last group at the Memorial on Sunday, obviously the US Open, the Canadian and Travelers - events I’ve played well in without getting over the finish line, so the manner of winning (in Scotland) gives me a lot of confidence," he added.
McIlroy opted not do a press conference before the action starts at Royal Liverpool. While that decision has not garnered much approval among journalists in the media centre, there’s evidence that, as a strategy, it has some merit for where he feels he is right now at the back end of the majors season.
He did the same last month before the US Open in Los Angeles, where he was runner-up, and ahead of the Scottish Open victory.
He also spoke this week about backing away from his role as a player-representative political figure within the game.
"The more I can focus on golf and on the things I want to focus on, that’s my goal. I’ve done enough of the talking over the last 12 or 18 months," he explained.
"I did thrive in that environment last year but at this point I’m just really fatigued of it so I just want to get back to being a golfer and I just made that decision recently. And it has helped to focus on the things that are important and the things that make me happy," he concluded.
McIlroy is up to number two in the world rankings after his win last week, one place ahead of the four-time PGA Tour winner in 2023 Jon Rahm, whose abilities on links golf courses are hard to fault.
The Masters champion was tied third at Royal St Georges two years ago and won two Irish Opens on similar terrain at Portstewart in 2017 and Lahinch in 2019.
He hasn’t won since the Masters but rushed into a top-10 finish at the US Open with a final round 65, which broke a run of uneven form as he had not challenged seriously for the title that week nor for the USPGA Championship in Rochester, New York in May.
The world number three’s strong desire to follow in the footsteps of his idol Severiano Ballesteros is palpable, especially at the majors.
"To be the first one (Spaniard) to win an Open since Seve in 1988 would be quite special and also to get to three majors and be second on the Spanish list (of major winners)," he said at his press conference this week.
World number one Scottie Scheffler has been a consistency machine in 2023, and indeed stretching back into November of last year – a period in which he has reeled off 19 consecutive tournament results inside the top 12, with two victories, one of which was the Players Championship in March.
Scheffler leads the tee-to-green ball striking statistics on the PGA Tour but languishes in 137th position in putting. It’s something, he feels, that has been overanalysed by outside observers.
"The things I am working on right now, I feel very excited about. I’m hitting a lot of good putts and pretty soon a lot of those will start falling in the middle of the hole instead of dodging around the sides," he said at his press conference.
While there is strong separation between where the top three are right now in the official world golf rankings and the rest of their OWGR pursuers, there are, of course, two LIV Series player whose rankings do not truly represent where they are in terms of their potential this week.
Defending champion Cameron Smith, now world number seven, won the LIV event in London recently and was fourth in the US Open.
He also tied ninth in the USPGA at Oak Hill in May, a tournament in which Brooks Koepka claimed his fifth major title after a three-year 'drought' and a disappointing Sunday at the Masters.
Apart from McIlroy, there are five other Irish contenders, including 2019 champion Shane Lowry, who appears to have found a key to solving his putting issues from early in the year - something which was clearly evident in his second and third rounds of 64 and 65 last week in Scotland.
Seamus Power was relieved that an MRI scan on his injured hip in Edinburgh last week came up clear and he reported himself to be fit this week to take his place on the timesheet in the first couple of rounds alongside two-time champion Padraig Harrington.
The 2011 title winner Darren Clarke and amateur qualifier Alex Maguire, the recent five-shot winner of the St Andrews Links Trophy, complete the list of Irish in the field.
