Scheffler is such an imperturbable character – a “flat-liner”, as people once said of Dustin Johnson – that it is easy to forget he is still just 25. He negotiated all the hidden nightmares of Augusta with the poise of a veteran. So devilish are the pin positions here on Sundays, and so slender the margins between glory and calamity, that it has traditionally been easier to play the role of the hunter, not the hunted. Just ask Greg Norman, who still bears the wounds of 1996.

But Scheffler is so fresh at this level that he carries none of the same mental scar tissue. He controlled the manic rhythms of the day with a sense of certainty of which even a young Tiger Woods would have been proud. Even as early as the third, he could have folded, with Smith’s birdies at the first and second all but erasing his advantage. Instead, having hooked his drive at the third beyond the television control tower and scuffed a chip off the pine straw, he holed his chip. A modest fist-pump confirmed his self-belief had returned. Smith, his early surge extinguished by an unlikely two-shot swing, never recovered from the shock.

Scheffler has crept up quietly on the golfing radar. With few players truly dominating this era, he seized the No 1 spot this season courtesy of three victories in 42 days. There is a world of difference, though, between bestriding the tour and closing out at the Masters. This is a back nine that has claimed many an unwary victim, McIlroy and Spieth among them. But Scheffler evidently had no intention of joining their number, facing down every risk with inscrutable composure. At the 14th, he was inch-perfect in spinning his ball away from the green’s treacherous back edge to set up a birdie. Even at the par-five 15th, where he could have been forgiven for laying up to protect his lead, he arced a laser-like second over the water to build a five-shot cushion. Did this man even have a pulse?

So often, it is the sound that can ruffle the leaders at Augusta. The noises cascade through the canyons between the pines, with players left in no doubt as to the dramas unfolding ahead. Scheffler heard the delirium detonated by McIlroy’s coup de grace from the sand all too clearly. Quite frankly, you could have heard it across the state line in South Carolina, the decibel count rising as Collin Morikawa followed McIlroy in from another bunker. But Scheffler betrayed not a glimpse of inner turmoil, trusting in his official status as the finest player on the planet.