Pablo Hernandez turned 35 next month and Leeds United, a club with Premier League aspirations, would like him to be 37 before he considers leaving.
Those numbers are key to underlining the impact of this Spanish footballer on this West Yorkshire football club and its supporters.
We will never know if such contract extensions would have been offered without the influence of Marcelo Bielsa upon Hernandez’s twilight years.
It’s hard to refute the mutual benefit of their relationship upon one another across the past two years.
There was a key juncture when the penny seemed to drop, publicly at least, for Bielsa on what he had on his hands in this corner of the world.
Bielsa spoke to the media after his team had just battered Norwich City, the eventual champions, 3-0 on their own pitch in August 2018.
It was the fifth league match of the season and they were unbeaten in all of them. Hernandez had scored a lovely curler at Carrow Road that day.
“It's obvious that Hernandez has been very important to our team,” he said.
“He is the player who has the best regularity and he's the player with the biggest influence in the control of the games.
“He's a very intelligent player.”
Asked about the important of Hernandez’s maturity and experience, aside from his outright technical quality, he said: “It's an expression of his experience.
“He's a complete player from every point of view. There is a difference between experience and decisions.
“You have players with a lot of experience, but with a lack of lucidity when it’s about taking decisions.
“Pablo reads the needs of the team and he gives solutions to all the problems of the team and in each sector of the field.”
And then came the killer line, the words which stand out as some of the grandest praise Bielsa has paid since arriving.
Could he still improve Hernandez in his latter years?
“I think he can make me a better head coach because I see solutions he is finding and decisions he is taking, that I only saw a very few times during my career.
“I maybe saw this in players who played in different positions, in the middle of the pitch, but to have such an influence when you play on the side and having an influence in the front, in the middle and in the back.
“His style is not something that wakens, in the rival, the desire to neutralise him because he always intervenes making the actions more fluid because he has an influence, he intervenes in very small spaces and he makes the action, the play of his team-mates, a lot more easier.
“It's really a player that improves his team-mates. He makes his team-mates better and he gives solutions to actions very complicated and he puts his team-mates in better situations.
“He is a real silent leader. He always takes the responsibility for the difficult things and he makes it easier for his team-mates to play.
“He does all of this without speaking, without saying a word.”
