Will this be the Masters where we finally move into the future?

Though he remains the No. 1-ranked golfer in the world, Dustin Johnson already talks about last year’s disastrous Masters as the one that might end up defining him.

“I get asked about it every day out here on the range or walking down the fairway,” Johnson said this week. “I’m reminded of it all the time.”

Last year, Johnson was that thing seldom seen at any major tournament – a prohibitive favourite. He’d won three consecutive starts on the way in, and had the loose look of a man untroubled by doubt. It’s not something you see often on the face of a pro golfer.

Then, in a move pulled from the Suburban Dad handbook, he took a header off a flight of stairs in stockinged feet and banjaxed his spine.

That was a Wednesday. On Thursday, Johnson appeared at Augusta National, moving like James Brown already wrapped in the cape. He took a few painful swings and decided he could not go.

In the year since, a decent chance for Johnson to win has ossified in the public’s mind into a title he should have had.

Months later, Johnson said he could still feel the effects of the injury. He has never recovered that imperious form of early 2017. He’s just one of the very good ones now. You can already feel time moving by the 33-year-old American.

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At the outset last year, the Masters field was as wide open as a grade-school sack race. No one shot particularly well. A pair of stunned journeyman, Charley Hoffman and William McGirt, were the story of the first couple of days.

You had the sense not of a star in the making, but of a tournament to be forgotten forming. Then Sergio Garcia came on and the whole thing ended in a lovely Hallmark moment. It wasn’t a great Masters, but one to feel good about.

This year, matters have tightened up a smidge. If 2017 was an open call, 2018 is shaping up as a multigenerational battle royale. The next several days at Augusta is where we’ll decide if we’re finally moving on into the future, or whether we’ll spend a little longer pining for the past.

Augusta National remains agnostic in such matters, except where they are image related.

On Wednesday, six years after admitting its first female members, the club announced the launch of a women’s tournament.

It won’t be a big deal – limited to amateur players; to be held a week before the main event, when it is guaranteed to be swamped by pre-Masters hype.

But given where this club was a decade ago, and where it is now, this is wokeness at warp speed. Augusta National recently stepped out of the 1960s and has now made it up to the 1990s.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that’s where men’s golf remains as well. Because, hey look, Tiger and Phil are back.

It’s hard to feel nostalgic for this pair because a) they weren’t particularly cuddly when they were great, b) they were even less so when they became mediocre/merely very good and c) they never left.

Depending on your perspective, the good or bad thing about golf is that the familiar faces hang around forever. Incentivized by sponsors who do not care if you are a winner, just that you are vaguely recognizable as the athlete you once were and can still get your face on TV, players keep on keeping on.

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Mike Weir rarely plays any more. He hasn’t had a top-10 finish in five years. He’s made one Masters cut in the past seven tries.

But he’ll still be out there on Thursday morning, enjoying the privilege of a past champion. Why? For fun and money. And not necessarily in that order.

In every other sporting garden, all the flowers are annuals. Only in golf can you be perennial.

The sport lacks the mechanism of shame that encourages older athletes to quit once they’ve fallen below the mean. There are basketball players who could probably continue into their middle 40s, doing just one thing well for a few minutes a game. But they would look ridiculous.

Ridiculous is a regular occurrence on the PGA Tour. On any given weekend, someone out there looks as though they’re hacking at the ball with an axe handle. Usually, several someones.

So if there’s a buck to be made from it, why not make it?

Pernicious injury has forced Weir to make way for others. Though diminished, Tiger and Phil haven’t felt those effects in the same way. For them, 80 per cent of what they were remains good enough to place well and suck up all the attention.

As long as they bob around near the top, it’s impossible for anyone who’s come afterward to attain the level of mononymic.

That pair have reduced two following generations to relative anonymity.

Off a golf course, few people could pick Johnson out of a crowd. He’d just be another buff guy wearing a ball cap at the table in a P.F. Chang’s. Marrying a Gretzky had the odd effect of making him even more anonymous – because he’s always going to be the second-best athlete at Thanksgiving dinner.

You could say the same for Justin Rose, Jordan Spieth or Justin Thomas – all guys who are so like one another in terms of looks, never mind names, that they are functionally indistinguishable.

Rory McIlroy managed briefly to rise above the trailing pack, but he’s fallen back into it in recent years. He has neither the consistency nor the personality to maintain the interest of the casual fan when he’s not winning.

Five years ago, golf hung its hope on a proper showdown and the orderly handing off of the crown, from Woods to whomever.

That won’t happen now. The cohorts have been intermingled and confused for too long. Woods’s tentative return further muddles things.

Whoever is to become the next overarching star of golf has yet to appear on the scene.

What we get instead is a grand, Bruegelesque scene of everyone who’s mattered for the past quarter century meeting in one place. As such, this year’s Masters may be the first all-star game in any sport that actually matters.