Sergio Garcia can win the Masters, whether he believes it or not

Finally, does Sergio believe in himself?

I mean, we believe. We’ve bought in — as viewers, as fans, as golf writers. We’ve gotten sucked into this narrative before. Heck, I’ve written this before. I wrote it last year before the final round of the U.S. Open. I wrote it again before the Open Championship. Maybe I’ll write it again in June at Erin Hills.

Or maybe, maybe, this is the final time we’ve got to talk about majorless Sergio Garcia: the man who’s played 71 straight major championships — the longest active streak in the game — without a title.

After a brilliantly stoic 3-under-par 69 to vault himself into the lead at The Masters, Sergio Garcia will once again walk in the final grouping of a major championship. He’ll do it as an older, more mature player than he’s been for 20 years. He seems different. He’s gone from guy-you-write-off come major time to hot trendy pick. But the question: Does he believe in himself enough to weather the relentless mental test that is winning The Masters?

“I think that I’m a little bit calmer now,” Garcia said after his pace-setting round on Friday. “I think that I’m working on trying to accept things, like I said earlier, which can happen here and can happen anywhere. It’s part of golf. It’s not easy. It’s much easier to say than to do it. But that’s the challenge we always have, you know, making sure that you accept the bad moments or the bad breaks with the good ones and kind of move on.”

Whether he wins or not, Sergio is different now. He certainly seems calmer. He’s grown older, grown more mature — finally got engaged to wife-to-be Angela Akins earlier this year. From the outside, that’s seemingly changed him. There are less headlines about snarky quips or Michelob Ultra commercials and more about quality golf. The beard’s showing peaks of gray. The once-so-strong hairline is thinning. He speaks like a man who’s truly comfortable in who he’s become and who he is. This is the new Sergio Garcia, we think. Compared to his pseudorival, age has treated him well.

“Good things that happen to you in life help. For me, this is my hobby and job at the same time. So all those good things, and being surrounded by great people that are not afraid of telling you something when you do something wrong — that’s something that I feel like I’ve always been very blessed with.”

But still, some cobwebs aren’t easy to shake. The six-footer at the Open Championship in 2007. All the weekend major collapses over the years. Medinah in 1999. Twenty years of hellish mental imagery is quite a bit to overcome on the golf course. This is still the same guy, of course, who said at this same tournament five years ago that he was never good enough to win any major:

“I’m not good enough ... I don’t have the thing I need to have,” Garcia said in Spanish. His comments were translated for the Augusta Chronicle. “In 13 years I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to play for second or third place.”

What isn’t different is that Sergio remains the transcendent talent he’s always been, even at 37. For the better part of 20 years, he’s been one of the game’s best ballstrikers — and he’s still that today. Such might explain part of his success this week. Windy conditions put a premium on striking it solidly. He was absurdly solid through those conditions that rattled so many — one single bogey through the opening 27 holes of the tournament.

Don’t get confused: Sergio Garcia deserves a major championship. If titles were equitable to his contributions to the game, he’d have multiple already. Even though the rivalry that seemed destined from Medinah in ‘99 on with Tiger Woods didn’t materialize, he’s had thousands, millions of fans who have stuck by the mercurial, snakebitten star since he burst onto the scene there so many years ago.

But does he believe he deserves it?

That’s a far better question — and one that may shape what we see this weekend at Augusta.