Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Littler, if you think your year is done?

After Luke Littler’s march into the last 16 at the Paddy Power PDC World Championship, he has one more appointment to fulfil in 2024. A date with burly Geordie dark horse Ryan Joyce on Monday, for a place in the quarter-finals on New Year’s Day, is the boy wonder’s reward for a flattering 4-1 defeat of Ian White on another track from his Saturday night fever album.

And that will be a wrap. Thank you, 2024, you’ve been a wonderful audience - but just watch Luke the Nuke go in 2025. In the ultimate generation game, Littler exacted token revenge on White for distant fixtures in the Runcorn pub league, when White regularly beat his grandfather.

It wasn’t always convincing. In the worst-case scenario, we feared that after Day and Day would come doomsday. Lights out, tinsel down, cancel that New Year party. But a reminder: Luke Littler is 17 years old. Give the kid a break.

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They said he would burn out on the relentless carousel of the . Pull the other one - he won the darned thing. They said teenage naivety would run aground when it encountered adult cynicism in the big, bad . Another cracking joke - Littler has won 10 titles in his debut season as a professional, yielding more than £1 million in prize money.

They said he couldn’t possibly sustain his fairytale to last year’s final as a 16-year-old. But if the Grand Slam, Premier League and World Series finals don’t ring any bells, there’s nobody home in the belfry. And they said darts wasn’t a ‘proper’ sport. Tell that to the masses who voted Littler runner-up in the ’s Sports Personality of the Year poll.

Don’t listen to the pub bores. Darts is the new night out on the red carpet, even if the carpet sticks to your feet, and Littler is our Prince of the Palace. On his return to world championship orbit seven days earlier, he was almost overwhelmed by a nation’s expectations until he found a summary cure for the dreaded first-night rectal twitch and unfurled a record-breaking set to break Ryan Meikle’s resistance.

This time, as the largely teutonic soundtrack from a boisterous audience finally turned to seasonal refrains about walking in a Littler wonderland, he was riddled with nerves again. At 54, White’s best days are not necessarily behind him, but most of them are visible only in a rear-view mirror.

And the Potteries veteran, whose only quarter-final appearance here was back in 2014, soon made a mockery of the bookies. The Nuke made hard work of taking the opening set with a lukewarm average of 84.53, some 56 points down on his charge for the chequered flag against Meikle.

If Littler’s fast starts were a feature of his run to the final 51 weeks ago, this year he has been stalling on the starting grid. Spraying his arrows across the board like a subway graffiti artist on the rampage with his aerosol, he missed four of his first 17 darts at a double and White took advantage to level the contest.

Finally, gradually, the tide began to turn in Littler’s favour, and when he took out 88 on the bullseye to go back in front, there was a sense of factory settings being restored. He rammed another 12 maximum 180s into the treble 20 lipstick - that makes 788 for the year - enough to sustain his progress into the last 16.

But Littler will have to play with more conviction, and consistency, if he is going to ring in 2025 with £500,000 of pocket money.