Cast your mind back to 2016. Lionel Messi has just missed a penalty in a Copa America final shootout. Argentina have lost a fourth major final in nine years. "For me, the national team is over," he tells the world.

Nobody doubts him. Now fast-forward to Monday night — two days before his 39th birthday — and the same man is standing in a stadium, having just become the World Cup's all-time leading scorer. Sport rarely writes a reversal this dramatic. It takes him just 38 minutes to rewrite history.

After an eighth-minute penalty miss that briefly threatens an awkward evening, Messi drives a low strike past the Austrian goalkeeper for goal number 17, moving him clear of Germany's Miroslav Klose, who had held the record since 2014. The crowd has barely settled when, deep into second-half stoppage time, he squeezes the ball through two defenders from a brutally tight angle. Eighteen World Cup goals in 28 games. The record is his, and it is not close.

The context makes it richer. Exactly 40 years earlier, on that same date, Diego Maradona scored twice in a 2-1 quarter-final win over England in Mexico. Messi's double against Austria arrives as if the football calendar had planned it. Spanish journalist Guillem Balague, speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live, captures the collective breathlessness: "We don't have time to create statues for Lionel Messi or deep analysis for him in newspapers — we cannot keep pace.

" Argentina are already through to the last 32, and Jordan await. Since reversing his retirement, Messi has guided his country to two Copa America titles and a first World Cup since 1986. The goals keep arriving, the records keep falling — and nobody, at this point, would be foolish enough to say when it ends.