You should never go back. Sometimes you’ve got to go back. Stop living in the past. Sometimes the past can define your future.

It’s all debate, in the end; all presentation and videos and argument. None of it matters, not really. All that does count is what happens when the ball arrives in the penalty area.

And does it feel like Carlisle United are in a better place to make the most of that rather important footballing circumstance with Charlie Wyke, as opposed to without him?

Of course it does. If the chances are there, history tells you Wyke will take them. If the build-up is right, the finish will surely come.

This leads us to the other important and, as yet, unresolved aspect of Carlisle’s summer recruitment. That one is obvious too: making those chances, arranging the build-up.

It is no use having a Wyke, or a Luke Armstrong for that matter, if you cannot supply them. Armstrong, last season, was an honest chaser, a determined worker, yet one as hungry as Oliver Twist for anything edible at all.

The scraps, the gruel, rarely came. So Paul Simpson’s next decisive moves must be in the areas of flair, skill, pace.

This we know, and it would insult Simpson to think he does not know it better than anyone too. United have a month and ten days to complete this picture, to add some subtle shades to the increased set of primary colours they now have in attack.

They have the time and, quite clearly, resources to do so. And another selling point as of today.

Landing Wyke will, you’d think, tickle the fancy of a would-be creator weighing up his pre-season options. If you’ve got a No9 (ok, his squad number is 10) of his calibre, chances are your service might just be rewarded.

Nicky Adams found this in 2016 when he was the summer’s “statement signing”. Then, it was a question of who’d make the most of some high-quality assists (Wyke turned out to be the consistent answer).

Now it’s who’ll provide them. That’s a matter of system and shape as well as personnel. Carlisle must play in a strong, adventurous way last season lacked. If they mean to stay on the front foot they must have not just the players but the strategy to remain there.

Wyke, in his first Blues spell, was not a scorer of spectacular goals, but was a highly efficient finisher in the 18-yard boxWyke, in his first Blues spell, was not a scorer of spectacular goals, but was a highly efficient finisher in the 18-yard box (Image: David Hollins)

Coming up with the right schemes is primarily down to Simpson and his coaches, not the recruitment team. In Wyke, Armstrong and Georgie Kelly they have line-leaders, penalty-box merchants, strikers of size and stature.

They will need support, to be surrounded by zest and some younger, riskier prospects operating in the correct framework. Get all that right, and our grounds for 2024/25 optimism can very much head north.

Anyone with any misgivings about signing Wyke (the minority, looking at the initial reaction) can also look to the recent past for reassurance. Carlisle’s last prolific goalscorer was past 30 and not exactly blessed with pace. Yet Kristian Dennis knew where to be, where to operate and, goodness me, knew where the ball was going to drop, more often than not.

He was, all in all, United’s most potent goalscoring centre-forward since…Charlie Wyke. The second coming of the latter ought to see the benefits of experience aligned to his old scoring instincts. He will be no less mobile than Dennis, and has a higher-end CV. He has functioned in teams and in dressing rooms which do not tailor a player to struggle in League Two.

He has the skill set which ought to suit the fourth tier and its sometimes chaotic 18-yard areas. His name, too, will convince rivals that Carlisle are, in the favoured football parlance, indeed “having a go” this coming season.

None of this presents guarantees. A name, a headline signing, is not always the way. United, we painfully know, went for one or two of those in the summer of 2014 (the last time they came down from League One) and look where it got them.

Their best signing of recent times turned out to be a delivery driver who’s now playing in the Championship (bloke from Denton Holme, you’ll remember his name). None of this, though, means you don’t wholeheartedly leap at the chance to sign Charlie Wyke to spearhead your League Two side when the opportunity emerges.

Few of Wyke’s 2015 to 2017 goals dance in the memory, but his record does. He was not a spectacular scorer but a highly efficient one: good in the air, deft from close range, expert at finding those spaces others can’t.

If that isn’t a sought-after player for the fourth tier, then every manager who tells you otherwise is lying. Wyke’s character, meanwhile, sails through customs: a professional whose standards nobody has ever questioned, and a man who has had to put his career and indeed life back together after the heart attack, in 2022, that almost cost him it all.

Celebrate him for that before anything else. Then delight in his smiling arrival back through the big blue gates. Think of the possibilities. And now, at a place flexing its newly-gained muscles more evidently than ever, wait on Simpson to put together the rest of what Carlisle - and Charlie Wyke - will need in time for August 10.