As 2007 became 2008, Osaka-born Keisuke Honda was still a young player making his name in Japan's J.League.
After failing to make the grade at Gamba Osaka he played his first professional football at Nagoya Grampus Eight before moving to VVV-Venlo of the Eredivisie, where he soon experienced the ignominy of relegation.
"The failure at VVV taught me a valuable lesson," he definitely wrote himself in an article for The Players' Tribune that was published during FIFA World Cup 2018.
"In order to succeed, I needed to change my game. I couldn't just be a passer, like I always had been. I needed to become a goal scorer. I need the ball."
Two years later Honda signed for CSKA Moscow, where he became the first Japanese player to score in the UEFA Champions League knock-out round and the first to play in the quarter-finals.
That summer, the 23-year-old playmaker appeared in the World Cup finals for the first time.
What's the big deal?
Honda was outstanding at South Africa 2010, without question Japan's most influential player.
Deployed as a false nine, he demonstrated his under-appreciated knack for hold-up play as well as his usual repertoire of clever touches, deft dribbling and a lethal drop of the shoulder.
He was - is, at the time of writing - a highly capable passer with a devious creative mind, particularly fond of a first-time pass in the attacking third that the rest of us don't see.
In his World Cup career he displayed to the world his mastery of a curious, half-scooped crossing technique and a deadly free kick, as Denmark discovered to their cost in 2010.
Honda's left peg presumably had to be smuggled into South Africa but, in truth, its bark was always worse than its bite.
Honda delivered in fits and starts but he was consistently a player of elegance, balance and imagination. He loved to be on the ball and would drift anywhere on the pitch to get it. He tracked back to spark transitions simply because he liked to be involved.
It's little wonder, then, that he captured the imagination so.
The World Cup used to thrive on the exotic, a quadrennial window on the wide world of football.
By 2010 we knew all about Spain and Italy, France and Germany, and more. International match coverage and migration of players made sure of that.
Japan were different. J.League's footprint in Europe was negligible; its total UK viewership could have squeezed into the back room of a boozer.
To most of us - by no means all, but most - Samurai Blue were unknown in a way Brazil and Argentina hadn't been for decades.
Thanks to distance, time difference and our typical skepticism of leagues younger than some of our underpants, the players in Takeshi Okada's primarily Japan-based squad were on our screens for the first time.
Okada selected just four players from outside Japan.
Former Kyoto Purple Sanga man Daisuke Matsui was at Grenoble, the third of his four French clubs. 22-year-old Takayuki Morimoto had spent the last few years with Catania after becoming, at 15, the youngest J.League player and goalscorer.
The team's captain, on the field at least, was Makoto Hasebe, then of Wolfsburg and later of Eintracht Frankfurt.
Honda was by far the most recent of the four exports at Okada's disposal. With only 15 caps to his name at the start of the finals in South Africa, he was hardly a veteran of the national team either.
2014 might be regarded as the first World Cup played at the spiteful, ubiquitous fingertips of social media, but the same label was also plastered across a slew of post-tournament think-pieces four years earlier.
So, when Honda caught the world's eye on football's greatest stage, his was the name on everyone's lips. South Africa 2010 had its emergent star.
Did this goal actually mean anything?
Japan's first World Cup finals goal was scored by the fascinating Masashi Nakayama in Lyon, with his team already 2-0 down and en route to their third straight defeat at France '98. It was the last match of Okada's brief first spell as the national team's head coach.
Japan co-hosted with South Korea in 2002 and then failed to win again in Germany four years later, albeit with a goalless draw to their name and a goal to celebrate against each of Australia and Brazil.
Honda's goal against Denmark in Rustenburg was only the fifth scored by a Japanese player in the World Cup finals outside Japan. He'd also scored the fourth, ten days earlier, to give them their first overseas World Cup win against a thoroughly disappointing Cameroon side.
Japan's 1-0 loss to the Netherlands in their second match in South Africa meant that they needed a result against the Danes, for whom only a win would suffice.
Okada, who named the same eleven for the third time, wanted them to get the job done properly.
"I did tell the players that we should not think about any draw," he said before the match. "This means that we have to score. So from the beginning we will start out with the intention of winning."
17 minutes in, Honda's and Japan's second goal of World Cup 2010 set a course for exactly that.
Get on with it...
With the endless buzz of the vuvuzelas droning away in the background, Honda fancied himself from the moment Japan were awarded a free kick for a high foot on Hasebe.
He placed the ball 30 yards from the goal line but in line with the right-hand edge of the penalty area as he viewed it. The total distance to Thomas Sørensen's far post was rather further than 30 yards yet Honda never wavered in his intentions.
His signals to Japan's players, assembled in readiness for a cross, were mere artful misdirection. His eyes betrayed as much.
Denmark's wall of three men inexplicably became two when Thomas Kahlenburg stepped behind Martin Jørgensen and captain Jon Dahl Tomasson immediately before Honda's strike.
His target wasn't in or above the wall, but near it. Hasebe, Kahlenburg's club colleague at Wolfsburg, was stationed there, poised to shove him out of the kick's tear towards goal; he must have been surprised when Kahlenburg accepted his invitation without the need for force.
Hasebe ducked and Honda brilliantly found the slipstream behind his retreating head. The CSKA man's technique was incredible, almost casual in its execution.
Punching down, across and through the ball all at once, he sent it towards the wall before it faded viciously away over Hasebe's shoulder blades and into the Rustenberg sky.
Having breached Denmark's defensive set-up with ease the ball took a pronounced, tantalising wobble in Sørensen's direction before swinging away from him once and for all.
It dropped into the side-netting as suddenly as it had risen and Japan consigned Denmark's early dominance to the past.
Honda - Man of the Match in two of Japan's matches in South Africa, football's glittering new darling - had hit Sørensen's towel from 40 yards away.
So, this is a goal people talk about?
Honda's goal was, like so many intoxicating World Cup moments, famous for five minutes.
Of course, it soon had superlatives fired at it like t-shirts out of a cannon.
Brilliant. Stunning. Spectacular. Blistering.
But it retains its shimmer only in Japan, we assume, and in indulgent, overly detailed retrospectives on football websites. And we should know.
"A decoy? A bluff?" wrote Planet Football many years hence of Honda's pre-glory instructive gesturing.
"Not quite. As we watch the grappling off to stage left, it feels like someone has left a renaissance painting up in a gallery, allowing Honda's free-kick to be hung alongside it.
"Honda is no fool - he knows the best art can get left unappreciated if it isn't properly framed."
In his match report for The Independent, Ian Herbert drew the same comparison as had the English commentary team in the moment.
"The bleached blonde hair, the yellow boots, the blue gloves and that particular stance when he shapes up to deliver a free kick," he mused.
"Keisuke Honda has studied all the poses and coquetry which might make him the Asian Cristiano Ronaldo, and he happens to have some of his qualities too."
Herbert posited that the free kick against Denmark confirmed Honda as one of the World Cup's star players up to that point. Morten Olsen, the opposition coach, agreed.
Shouldn't the goalkeeper have saved it?
It should be acknowledged that the official match ball of South Africa 2010 was already familiar to J.League players. If their insight explains Moscow-based Honda's proficiency with the infamous Jabulani, it does so only partially.
Yasuhito Endō's laser-guided free kick later in the match might well be a different story. So central was the second free kick placed that Sørensen was likely distracted by Honda's left-footed threat but escaped much of the blame second time around.
Endō's right-footed shot whipped over the wall, the last place Denmark wanted it to go.
Sørensen was a very fine goalkeeper on his day but supporters of his three Premier League clubs knew that he was no more immune to an error than any other goalkeeper. Honda's free kick was one of them.
He can be forgiven for cheating a little in the first instance. Honda's decision to take on the shot from such a distance was extraordinarily ambitious and Sørensen's position prepared him for the more likely flat cross into the box.
He even had a shot covered; Honda's left foot was a known entity in the Danish camp and the goalkeeper's fatal step to his left was a natural reaction to the more traditional trajectory expected from a shooter in that position.
The knuckle ball, later employed to devastating if inconsistent effect by Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale of Wales - and to no effect whatsoever by a thousand feckless YouTubers - was, in 2010, a still uncommon technique.
Nevertheless, Sørensen's reactions with the ball seemingly within reach - albeit visible only for a moment - were found wanting.
UEFA's official website suggested quite fairly that he "might have been disappointed with his positioning for that one" - ESPN's match report concurred.
What happened next?
No sooner had Japan's set-piece masterclass swept them past Denmark, exciting football nerds and the watching world alike, than their Second Round defence-versus-defence match against Paraguay stunk the place out.
After 180 goalless minutes Paraguay scored all five penalties to knock out the Japanese and pave the way for Okada's second Samurai Blue departure.
Honda scored his penalty and ended his tournament with a global legion of newly acquired fans.
He was Japan's best player again as they won the AFC Asian Cup in 2011 but injury problems soon affected his form and fortunes for club and country.
Nevertheless he scored once in each of the next two World Cups, elevating his legend beyond that of any other Asian player.
Their winless group stage exit in 2014 was a disappointing way to miss the marker they placed against Denmark.
They fared better in 2018, Honda's influence no longer out of proportion as they squeezed through their group.
In the Second Round they rediscovered the rhythm of Rustenberg.
Japan were excellent against Belgium, catching the eventual bronze medalists off guard and snatching a 2-0 lead early in the second half. The comeback that ejected them from the World Cup left a bitter taste.
One presumes there was no such problem for Honda, who by now had had a flavour of life in Serie A with AC Milan and in Mexico with Pachuca, and signed for Melbourne Victory with Japan's World Cup exit still fresh in the memory.
After all, Honda wasn't just a footballer. In 2012 he became Mr MINTIA, the jet-setting, forgetful and sugar-free face of a Japanese commercial campaign in which he dazzled viewers in a suit best described as impossibly white.
When it comes to the tale of Keisuke Honda's increasingly bizarre career, especially after South Africa, that barely scratches the surface.
***
Words by Chris Nee. Art by Dotmund.
@SphinxFtbl