Jon Rahm was utterly ruthless at Augusta National, his closing 69 forcing a six-shot swing on Koepka, who ordinarily likes to carry himself into battle like John Wayne pushing through swing doors.

It’s just a little hard to keep doing that when your opponent has you by the throat.

Rahm’s win was, above all, a win for strength of character. Starting the week with a double bogey, he refused to blink, playing his next 17 holes on Thursday in nine-under par. In a field of assassins, nobody had a colder aim.

“I was calm,” he declared afterwards, his victory the fourth Masters win for Spain and one secured – just as Sergio Garcia’s was in 2017 – on what would have been Seve Ballesteros’s birthday.

Rahm’s reputation as a fighter was one he thoroughly embellished in Augusta.

“I never got frustrated,” he said. “I never really got . . . felt like anything was out of control. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a little bit related to determination. ​

“I know we all do, we put in a lot of effort to try to beat the best guys in the world. So maybe that level of intensity and that determination is what you see and that’s why I’m characterised as a fighter.

“I’m never going to give up, right? Even if I shoot myself out of contention, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t try my hardest on every shot, so maybe that’s where it comes from.”

It may be an unkind instinct but it seems a little unavoidable to compare Rahm’s ruthless mindset to that of Rory McIlroy.

A missed cut here left that career Grand Slam feeling as far away for McIlroy as it’s ever been, but it also re-awakened unflattering considerations about his appetite for the whitest heat of battle.

Sometimes with McIlroy you get the impression of almost over-enthusiastic self-analysis. In recent years, he’s had a permanent Tuesday slot in the Masters’ interview room, somewhere he is never less than interesting and engaging with the assembled media.

He is revered for that by golf journalists accustomed to interviewees who see these engagements only as potential traps.

McIlroy is under no obligation to keep doing this, but you get the impression he enjoys the process. Nine years of being asked about the career Grand Slam hasn’t yet, it seems, had any diminishing impact on his patience.

In that room we’ve heard McIlroy identify everything from the self-help books he reads, the ball juggling, the chats with old champions, the endless journey deep inside his own mind to solve this Augusta puzzle. There’s always been something inherently decent about his willingness to take us to that place.

He’s not a naturally adversarial competitor, he conceded his celebration of that sixth-hole Ryder Cup putt against Patrick Reed at Hazeltine in 2016 was uncomfortably out of character.

Above all, that was an explosion of anger, the rowdy American galleries finally pushing him over the edge.

“I never thought I’d see something like that of myself on the golf course,” he reflected the following January. “Something just came over me and I went absolutely nuts. I look at the video of it and chuckle, ‘Is that really me?’”

Of course, the punchline he hadn’t anticipated was that Reed would duly sink his putt too and go on to win their match, McIlroy conceding afterwards that the moment took more out of him than he had anticipated.

And that’s the suspicion with McIlroy. He’s simply not plumbed to be at war with an opponent in a way that comes so naturally to contemporaries like Reed and Rahm.

Could you imagine McIlroy winning a Major the way the Spaniard won the US Open at Torrey Pines in ’21, birdieing the last two holes by nailing those two utterly treacherous swinging putts?

Hard to see it.

McIlroy’s best golf is played almost when he’s free-wheeling, his game all power and seemingly cavalier shot-making. Last year’s closing Masters 64 was a case in point, McIlroy essentially in cruise control, playing consequence-free golf.

Maybe the solution to Augusta with all the ghosts it now carries for him is for McIlroy, first, to win another Major somewhere else, then come to Georgia with that particular monkey lifted from his back. Because it feels as if his story is just on an endless loop here.

Shane Lowry has been a far more compelling Masters contender these past two years, his demeanour at Sunday’s tied-16th finish following last year’s tied third precisely what you would expect of a man determined that his 2019 Open win will not be his only Major.

He’d made the perfect Sunday start with birdies on one and two and kept hanging on to his dream of a late charge until a poor approach to 14 came up short for bogey and he then found the water on 15 for a double.

“It’s just hard to take,” he reflected afterwards. “It’s kind of like I was very close to doing something very special this week and that’s the hardest thing to take. It might not look like that with the result or the finish, but I felt like it.

“I’m disappointed, obviously. I put a lot into this this week, and when I birdied 11, I thought, you never know here. Then 14 and 15 just killed me. It’s extremely disappointing. I know Jon is 12-under now, but at the time I was out there, I was feeling it.

“Like I had to go for it on 15. I felt like if I made eagle there . . . and you go back to thinking of lads like Charl Schwartzel birdieing the last four (in 2011) to win and you feel like maybe you can do something special.

“I tried and I failed. I’ll definitely try again.”

McIlroy started the week as world No 2, Rahm one place behind. But the Spaniard now sits top of the pile and his conviction was that he’d had help from above.

“The support was pretty incredible throughout,” he said. “And I kept hearing, ‘Seve! Seve! Seve! Do it for Seve!’. I heard that the entire back nine. That might have been the hardest thing to control today, the emotion of knowing what it could be if I were to win.”

In every other department, he’d been unbreakable.