BREAKING (and I use that word loosely): Jack Wilshere has won his first trophy as a manager after Luton beat Stockport 3-1 in the EFL Trophy final, and I am writing this from underneath my desk because the concept of linear time has just kicked down my door and started rearranging my furniture.

Sources close to sources tell me that Jack Wilshere, the same Jack Wilshere who scored THAT goal against Barcelona in 2011, the same Jack Wilshere who we all collectively decided was the future of English football before his ankles filed for divorce, is now a grown adult man winning trophies from the technical area. In a suit. Making substitutions. Presumably telling players to "believe in themselves" and "keep the intensity up" like some sort of functioning professional.

I'm sorry, but this is not something I was emotionally prepared for on a Sunday afternoon.

Let me be absolutely clear: I am delighted for him. Genuinely. The man spent more time in treatment rooms than most people spend in their own kitchens. His injury record read like a particularly aggressive game of Operation. The fact that he's carved out a managerial career and is now lifting actual silverware is a properly heartwarming story. But also, and I cannot stress this enough, it makes me feel like I have been alive for approximately nine hundred years.

Because here's the thing about footballers becoming managers. It happens gradually, then all at once. One minute you're watching a teenager ping a ball around the Camp Nou like he's playing a different sport to everyone else, and the next minute he's doing post-match press conferences about "the character of the lads" and you're googling "how to cope with ageing" at 11pm on a work night.

Wilshere's path to this moment has been quietly impressive, by the way. Took over at Luton, steadied the ship, built something. The EFL Trophy might not be the Champions League (though given what we've been reading about how the Champions League is apparently just a massive headache for Premier League clubs, maybe Wilshere's got the right idea). But a trophy is a trophy, and 3-1 in a final is 3-1 in a final, and if you'd told me in 2011 that the kid humiliating Barcelona would one day be celebrating a win over Stockport County like it was the greatest day of his life, I'd have... actually, I'd have probably believed you, because football is absolutely mental.

What gets me is the trajectory. Wilshere's playing career was supposed to be one of the great English midfield stories. Instead it became one of the great English "what if" stories. And now, somehow, through sheer bloody-mindedness and presumably an encyclopaedic knowledge of what NOT to do with young players' fitness programmes, he's writing a completely different story. A better one, possibly. Certainly a longer one. His managerial career has already lasted longer than some of his injury-free spells did as a player, and I say that with nothing but affection and a deep personal sadness about the fragility of the human body.

The real question, obviously, is what comes next. Sources close to sources tell me (and by "sources" I mean "my own wildly speculative brain") that a young English manager winning trophies at Championship level will attract attention. Bigger clubs will come sniffing. And then we'll get to have the whole conversation about whether Wilshere is "ready" for the next step, which is football's way of saying "we'd like to set you up for failure slightly earlier than planned."

But for now, let him have this. Jack Wilshere, trophy-winning manager. The boy who danced through Barcelona's midfield is now a boss. Time remains, as ever, completely and utterly undefeated.

If anyone needs me I'll be in the corner, looking at my hands and wondering where 2011 went.