There’s no place quite like Augusta National for evoking the kind of gushing, dewy-eyed cooing you’d adopt when confronted by a puppy gently pawing at the nose of a baby seal. The greenery, the flooers, the manicured fairways, the sight of Gary Player creaking into a karate kick after a hole-in-one at the par-3 contest? Everywhere you turn, there are folk oohing and aahing in slack-jawed reverence while the global media tends to cover affairs from a fawning position down there on bended knee.

Of course, it was a case of ‘arise Sir Daniel’ as Englishman Danny Willett snuggled himself into the green jacket at the end of a quite mind-mangling closing nine holes. For much of the week, the 80th staging of the Masters, with morale-sapping winds and greens so fast and firm it must have felt like trying to putt on the back of a soup spoon, looked more like the attritional grind you’d get at a plodding US Open. The old cliche ‘the Masters doesn’t begin until the back nine on Sunday’ really did ring true in the end, though. For Jordan Spieth, meanwhile, his Masters came to a shuddering halt on that bamboozling inward half. At one stage, most folk were probably slipping into their pyjamas, filling the hot water bottle and recklessly saying ‘I’m just turning in now because that’s it’ as Spieth led by five standing on the 10th tee. In this furiously fickle game, you never can tell what lies ahead even for someone so seemingly clinical and composed as Spieth. That’s just the predictably unpredictable nature of this captivating, cruel, capricious pursuit. Spieth may have stumbled spectacularly but Willett was simply superb and played like a true champion.

It’s almost a decade now since this correspondent and his colleagues first bumped into Willett when he beat Rory McIlroy in the first round of the 2007 Amateur Championship at Royal Lytham. McIlroy was already a boy wonder on the road to superstardom. Willett was, well, an excitable, unheralded bundle of energy from the Rotherham Golf Club who chattered away like a Bren machine gun and went through every single blow, bounce, dunt, yardage and putt of his match-winning performance until one of the more senior scribes interjected with a cajoling ‘can you just talk about the key holes please’. Willett would lose in the next round – to former Scottish Amateur champion Kevin McAlpine – and the next time we clapped eyes on him was at the Walker Cup later that season.

Here in 2016, he is a major champion. From a Scottish perspective, Willett’s rise, like that of Matthew Fitzpatrick or Shane Lowry or Chris Wood or Andy Sullivan to name but a few, underlines once again just how much of a catch up game our next generation are playing in the professional scene. A year ago, Blairgowrie’s Bradley Neil was enjoying a practice round with McIlroy in the Masters as Amateur champion. Last week he missed the cut in the qualifying school for the third-tier EuroPro Tour as his pro career suffered another confidence-crushing set back.

Willett, like many English and Irish golfers making the transition from the amateur game to the paid ranks, hit the ground running when he made the plunge in 2008. He got his tour card at the qualifying school, finished 58th on the money list and hasn’t looked back since. Our boys, who went toe-to-toe with the Willetts of this world in the amateur game, are nowhere to be seen and the step up continues to pose a formidable, often crippling, obstacle. The supremely talented Lloyd Saltman, a team-mate of Willett in the 2007 Walker Cup and an engaging, effervescent character who had all the qualities to be our next frontrunner, now has to settle for victories in the East of Scotland Alliance. Callum Macaulay, a World Amateur Team Championship winner with Scotland in 2008, is driving taxis, his team-mate from that victorious side, Wallace Booth, is battling on in the lower tiers as are Walker Cuppers like Michael Stewart and James Byrne. These likeable lads will be getting sick to death of seeing their names crop up in doom and gloom pieces like this. Yes, we have the 30-year-old Russell Knox making impressive strides in the US but there is a huge age gap between the full-time tartan campaigners on the main tours and those trying to bridge the void.

Talent is one thing, but mental resolve, drive, discipline, belief, general toughness and a bit of good fortune are attributes that are harder to foster. It’s a combination that still remains somewhat elusive for our next generation of tour players. Willett, meanwhile, proved he has those qualities in triumphant abundance.