After his point-saving goal at Stoke on Saturday, Wayne Rooney is now Manchester United's leading scorer, meaning his place among the club's greats is assured.
His record is a remarkable argument for his longevity. When Rooney arrived at Old Trafford for the sum of £27 million in 2004, he did so to widespread anticipation that he would be one of his country's finest ever players, and given that he is also England's leading scorer, he can reasonably reflect on a job well done.
The numbers themselves are elite: five Premier League titles, two League Cups, one FA Cup, one UEFA Champions League, one FIFA Club World Cup, as well as being voted the Player of the Year by both the Football Writers' Association and his peers.
Yet the questions will also turn to where exactly Rooney ranks alongside George Best, Sir Bobby Charlton and all of the other United legends, and it is here, like so many other matters concerning Rooney, that things become complicated.
To be one of United's very greatest players probably requires two things. First, the player in question must have been pivotal to the club's success or change in fortunes for the better; second, he must have shown a consistent devotion to the club.
Rooney can provide several examples of the first, but falls some way short on the second. Many supporters will not forgive him for trying to leave the club twice and on one occasion, even considering a move to Manchester City. For them, this attempted treachery was a step too far and will forever see his place in history marked with an asterisk
Maybe it is best to consider that there are several tiers of great United players. The first tier indisputably contains Charlton, Best and Denis Law, with strong claims for Eric Cantona, Roy Keane, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Cristiano Ronaldo, among others.
Rooney, by this reasoning, is somewhere in the second tier, a little down the mountainside from Bryan Robson.
Yet here we return again to Rooney's complexity. It is striking that someone Liverpudlian by birth should have become for so long the face of the ultimate Mancunian institution. To do that took more than being anointed by whoever was the sponsor of the day; he also had to embody the club's ethos, one which dictated that no cause was lost until the final whistle had sounded.
And Rooney has worked. Not only has he played an extraordinary amount of football, but he has also played it at a very high intensity. Consider the fact that Andriy Shevchenko, another feared forward who relied heavily on his dynamism, was deemed past his best by the age of 30. By the same age, Rooney had played 100 more games than Shevchenko.
As his career slowly draws to a close, what is Rooney's true legacy? For the present moment, it has unfortunately been tainted by his past few seasons, during which his form has declined progressively.
Eric Cantona left the professional game when he sensed that he no longer had his best to offer. Meanwhile, Rooney will keep playing and competing with the spirit of the schoolkid who refuses to go indoors long after he has been called home for dinner.
That same refusal to accept the odds has inspired Rooney to some of his most sublime performances. There was the hat trick on his astonishing Champions League debut against Fenerbahce, a night when he was overwhelming -- the perfect combination of vision, touch, pace and power.
Then there's most of the 2009-10 season, when he was effectively handed the keys to the attack after Cristiano Ronaldo's departure for Real Madrid and responded with 34 goals. His 2011-12 season, during which United were finally chased down by Manchester City in the league, was perhaps his last truly great year as a goalscorer.
But Rooney has always been about much more than goals. He has provided for others both with his passes and elusive movement, with Ronaldo being one of the chief beneficiaries.
In 2007-08, when Rooney and Carlos Tevez so often dovetailed in support of the Portuguese attacker, United fielded one of the most devastating forward lines of recent times. In that configuration, Rooney was often the supporting act, yet there is always the thought that had he been less self-sacrificing in his playing style, he might have enjoyed much greater mobility now.
But this is the most vain of considerations. Telling him to tone it down is as futile as asking a hurricane not to flatten trees. And that is how Rooney will hopefully be remembered in time: As a player whose irrepressible will was at the core of his best of his performances, even if it led to his undoing.