Jason Day wins the 2015 PGA Championship at Whistling Straits

Jason Day spent all weekend at the PGA Championship playing like a world class superstar who had come too close, too many times. Day is just 27 and his major championship career is less than five summers old, but he’s been at or near the top of the leaderboard at almost every single one of the game’s biggest events. This week at Whistling Straits, he left little doubt about his place at the top and cruised into the clubhouse with a 3-shot win and a new major scoring record at 20-under.

Prior to this week, Day had posted nine top 10 finishes in the majors, including five top fives and three runners-up. He has contended at all four majors, from Augusta to Scotland and all over the United States. This summer has been an improvement even beyond that consistency of prior seasons, getting to the 54-hole lead at the last three majors of the year. So this win was, even at 27, a long time coming and not at all surprising, and it came with the new No. 1 player in the world pushing him all the way.

Spieth is the best player in golf and has been since last December. He has admitted that he is not especially intimidating -- but when you’re sitting on the lead, he’s in your group, and his putter gets rolling, that is intimidating. That was the challenge facing Day, who went to sleep on the 54-hole lead or co-lead for the third straight major. He told reporters Saturday night that he needed to figure out how to “get out of his own way.”

Well, Day never really gave Spieth an opening. It wasn’t as if Spieth relented either. He ended a 36-hole bogey free streak but that was one of his only early mistakes. Even with Spieth’s majors experience and success this year, he knew pretty early on what he was up against.

So the pressure stayed on Day, and it came from the best player in the world right in front of him. There was no sign of baggage from that history of close calls -- Day started his final round even better than he did Saturday, when he rocketed to the top of the board with a 66. In that round, he vacillated from good hole to bad hole, displaying his awesome talent and the speed bumps that had inhibited from closing majors in the past.

That vacillation was gone Sunday. Day opened with four birdies in his first seven holes and was off to the races. Spieth’s birdies would not be enough. Day’s most recognizable and hailed attribute is his incredible length off the tee. On Saturday, he poked one 374 yards and said he didn’t even hit the ball with the center of the clubface.

But Day is obviously more than just a bomber, and spent all week throwing darts into pins and pouring in putts when his irons didn’t put the ball at tap-in distance. His start gave Spieth no quarter, and then a 50-foot bomb at the par-3 7th was the beggining of a stroll into the house for his first major title.

The reaction was similar to the one Saturday night, when he canned a putt from a mile away at the 17th green to stop the bleeding and get back on the lead by multiple shots. He’d make a couple bogeys in his final round, and chunked an awful approach shot at the 9th hole, but that stretch Saturday night seemed like the closest he came to relinquishing his lead.

Sunday was more about adding to the margin and trying to post a record total. He became just the second player in major championship history to get to 20-under with this birdie putt at the 14th.

Tiger Woods hit that mark before finishing at 19-under at St. Andrews. Day would bounce back and forth beween 19- to 20-under before holding on to get into the house with the new mark.

Day’s win was the perfect way to cap what has been a transitional year in golf. He will unquestionably be a part of this young cadre of players exchanging blows for the next two decades of the post-Tiger era. Day has been there for the last five years, really, but now he’s got the career-defining win to join the club with Jordan and Rory.

While Tiger, perhaps the greatest of all time, posted his third straight missed cut, Day set a new single majors record at 20-under while Spieth set a new season record at a combined 54-under across all four majors. Last summer, it became clear that Rory was a new face for the next era. This summer, Spieth’s dominance and Jason Day’s runaway win confirmed that that era is here.