'The goals from the sometime enfant terrible Wayne Rooney - an exquisitely weighted chip and a volley from the football heavens - would have been utterly remarkable only if they had come from the vast majority of Premiership players.
From Rooney they were merely the latest evidence of talent unique in his generation of English footballers - and fresh confirmation that if Ferguson can indeed guide the teenager through a potentially treacherous celebrity youth, his £28m investment will soon enough seem like the smallest change.
That of course remains a huge challenge, but as Rooney nosed his black sports car through the adoring throng, with a pack of fearless young autograph hunters darting like desperate railroad hobos running in his wake, he surely left Old Trafford with the aura of a young Mercury, the messenger of the gods.
For those who are now so relentlessly examining the minutiae of the rivalry between Ferguson and his brilliant challenger Mourinho, Rooney also left his mentor with one clear victory of nerve and judgement.
When Ferguson signed Rooney in the summer, Mourinho sniffed that he was just as happy with Mateja Kezman, picked up from Dutch football at less than a quarter of the Rooney price. Kezman could do more things, Mourinho told us. Maybe he could, but then perhaps a whole division of house painters might have made a better job on your kitchen than Picasso.
What Kezman cannot do is something Rooney is no doubt capable of in his sleep. This is reading a football situation in the acute way of only the great players. As Rooney has lurched into various misadventures - none, when you think about it, doing more than inviting the kind of discipline and care needed by any lightly educated youngster who has suddenly had the world heaped at his feet - there has been a tendency to sneer at certain ratings of his ability.
Some have laughed out loud at suggestions that Rooney does indeed have the raw talent to become one of the greatest players in the history of the game. Here, again, they were chastised by their failure to recognise the difference between high talent and intimations of genius. Rooney's goals on Saturday were most stunning simply because they were plainly comfortably within the scope of the talent he unfurled so superbly in the European Championship last summer and his debut for United in the Champions' League. He first did it on a big stage with the goal that shattered Arsenal at Goodison Park a few years ago and persuaded Arsène Wenger, no less, that Rooney was the most gifted young English player he had ever seen.
What is so thrilling about Rooney's game, when he does not appear to be impersonating Harry Enfield's grisly Kevin, is the sheer scale of it. Like all the great players, his perfection is in his effect. He does not permit doubt or argument and his best work is utterly functional, however superbly it is discharged.'