[Just like the old days, Tiger Woods won the Masters by intimidating his opponents.]

Woods’s victory had an epic feel to it. At Augusta, on perhaps the sport’s biggest stage, was its seminal figure, suddenly back on top, which is where he was a decade ago when everything suddenly went sideways for him.

What followed was a long, painful period of his life, in which his body repeatedly broke down and his marriage collapsed. But after prevailing on Sunday, Woods is back in the pantheon of the sports world’s biggest stars, back on a level with LeBron James, Serena Williams and Lionel Messi, back in a space he entered with his first Masters victory in 1997, when he was a skinny 21-year-old a year removed from Stanford who declared “Hello World” in a classic Nike commercial.

“It’s unreal for me to experience this,’’ Woods said in a television interview after his victory on Sunday. “It was one of the hardest I’ve ever had to win just because of what’s transpired the last couple of years.”

The long drought Woods endured between major championships — his previous one came at the 2008 United States Open — would have once seemed inconceivable. The same could be said for the 14 years it took for Woods to finally win his fifth title at Augusta National, a course so suited for his game that Nicklaus once predicted that Woods would collect more than the combined 10 Masters titles that he and Arnold Palmer won there.