AUGUSTA, Ga. – The ball was bound for devastation.

We’ve seen it before. Cameron Young’s drive at the par-5 13th was sailing left, heading for some combination of Rae’s Creek or the dense crop of pines and azaleas that hug the dogleg of the most famous par-5 in golf.

It’s the place you just don’t go. You can recover missing right, but left? Ask Freddie Couples how that went in 1998 or the countless others who found that ruin far before they were able to play their way into contention. It sank Couples’ pursuit of his second Masters. Young was flirting with his own demise.

Then something serendipitous happened. Young’s ball careened into one of those tall pines and bounced right in the middle of the fairway. A break. The kind that every eventual champion seems to get en route to victory. The thing was, Young already had a stroke of good fortune earlier when he misjudged the wind on the par-4 ninth, airmailing the green only for his ball to bounce off a patron and onto the green, where he saved par.

“You'll take anything you can get,” Young said.

To sum up Young’s remarkable 7-under 65 that vaulted him into a tie for the lead with Rory McIlroy as just a stroke of luck would be disingenuous. Luck only matters if you’re in a position to capitalize on it. Young was, and has been, ready to do so – a part of a larger game plan that helped him break through at THE PLAYERS Championship and may just carry him all the way to Butler Cabin for a green jacket ceremony on Sunday night.

There’s a universal truth in pro golf that can only be learned through experience, no matter how often you watch others come to the same realization before you: winning doesn’t always require perfection.

It sounds simple enough, but it’s the hardest thing to believe when you haven’t done it.

Young’s first PGA TOUR win at the Wyndham Championship was perfection. A dazzling display that made that final round a formality. Young won by six strokes, which actually undersells how dominant he was. But THE PLAYERS? That required a different playbook entirely, a victory that emerged from patience and a steadfast resolve to stick to the game plan and wait for those around you to cave.

“It was a great mental test of just how much can you linger,” Young said then. “How much can you keep yourself in the tournament and see what happens.”

It was quickly required at Augusta National this week. Young’s tournament began as dreadful as you could imagine, 4-over through seven holes, including three straight bogeys starting on the fifth. He shot 40 on the opening nine in what could have easily been the end of Young’s Masters. In prior years, it might have been. Young stayed undeterred, firm that he didn’t hit any poor shots. It was just a bit of poor judgment and a bit of poor execution. When that happens at the same time, “you can get in some tricky spots,” he said. “Just kind of missed an 8-footer for par a few times in a row.”

“You're going to hit a bad shot or two,” Young said. “The ability to just swallow it and move on and go hit your next shot, the emotions of it, the frustration, whatever it may be, I think this place really punishes you if you play angry or impatient. When something goes wrong, those are the things that you kind of naturally want to be. So it's fighting those natural inclinations toward those feelings and not letting it affect your decision-making, your execution for another shot.”

Young gathered himself and shot 3-under from there, carding a 1-over round of 73 that kept him in the conversation and allowed for what happened the next two days to be consequential.

The best of Young’s golf came Saturday, erasing an eight-shot deficit to McIlroy not by firing at pins and forcing the issue, but simply executing time after time and trusting it would lead to positive results. He benefited from the good breaks and created his own luck in other spots. He missed the green long on the par-3 fourth, which was the ideal miss to that pin, setting up a relatively simple chip that he holed. The great bounce off the patron on the ninth was also partly by design. Young knew if he was going to miss, the best miss was long. He didn’t plan for it to fly into the stands, but that margin for error was created by erring towards the lesser of two evils.

“I feel that I've gotten a lot better at just being present in what I'm doing,” Young said.

Case and point: the 15th hole. With McIlroy stumbling, Young had jumped into a tie for the lead. Facing a delicate wedge shot over the pond, Young didn’t give it enough power as the ball spun off the front of the green into the water. Young confidently dropped another ball from the same spot, committed to giving it a bit more oomph, stuck it to 6 feet and holed the putt for bogey. Then he flagged his approach on the 16th and made a birdie just as McIlroy made a mess of Amen Corner, briefly giving Young the outright lead.

That swing was a microcosm of what the entire final round on Sunday will be: Young and McIlroy duking it out from the final pairing with the likes of Sam Burns, Shane Lowry, Jason Day, Justin Rose and Scottie Scheffler all within striking distance.

Young will hope to be the calm within the chaos.

“We saw today a slow start and a hot start can erase a lot,” he said. “It's just kind of a matter of keeping myself in it tomorrow and doing the best I can to stay around the lead for as long as possible, and you see what happens at the end.”