Trying to remember when it seemed as if Landon Donovan making a comeback on the pitch … pretty much had to happen.

It couldn’t have been any later than the first month or two of the 2015 Major League Soccer season. Landon playing more games seemed inevitable, didn’t it?

Two powerful currents pushed him in that direction.

–At 32, he seemed too young to be giving up the game for physical reasons. He wasn’t broken down; he didn’t walk with a limp. He scored 10 goals and had 19 assists in his “last” season with the LA Galaxy, 2014 — numbers too strong for the best player born in the USA to walk away from the game forever.

–What else was he going to do? We have wondered for years how a retired Landon would keep himself occupied. There was marriage, travel, a son and (presumably) a welcome mental break from his life’s work. But he said he didn’t want to coach adults, and I believed him. He did TV work with Fox, but “TV pundit” is not a good role for him. The small screen seems to reduce his emotional range to a similarly cramped spectrum.

Also, Landon knows David Beckham played effectively till he was 38 and that current Galaxy imports Robbie Keane and Steven Gerard are each 36, and Frank Lampard is 38. When the itch to play returned to the greatest scorer in MLS and U.S. national team history … Landon was young enough to scratch it.

And now here he is, back in the fold and riding to the rescue (perhaps) of the battered Galaxy, thin in attacking players, a team that very much could use someone like the Landon of old as the MLS season winds down and the playoffs approach.

A fifth championship with the Galaxy? A seventh, personally (including his two in San Jose)?

Could be.

So, what happens next?

The first thing that comes to mind is conditioning. Landon has not played a serious game since December of 2014. That is 21 months ago. And there is “civilian-in-shape” physical condition and “professional-soccer-player” condition, which is pretty extreme these days.

Twenty-one months is long enough for some of the aches and pains of a lifetime playing soccer (from Redlands to Rancho Cucamonga, to Germany, etc.) to diminish, but the layoff could effect his timing and his ability, any time soon, to play 90 minutes.

Not even he, probably, knows how this will go in the first weeks. A break of nearly two years … probably about as long as an athlete can go, in his 30s, and still be something similar to what he was.

We would expect him to be in the Galaxy midfield, somewhere, linking up with Giovani dos Santos and Keane.

Short term, we should expect him to come in as substitute for the final half hour or so, perhaps as soon as Sunday night’s home game with Orlando City, maybe shifting to a starting role in a month or so, coming off around the 70-minute mark, if his conditioning lags.

We can be confident in this: Galaxy coach Bruce Arena understands Landon as well as anyone, and he will know when to let Landon go and when to pull back on the reins a bit.

For Galaxy fans, having Landon around has to be like climbing into a warm bath — a sense of familiarity and well-being, even if he is, apparently, going to wear the No. 26 (rather than the 10 he wore in Los Angeles, which now belongs to Dos Santos).

It is a great news story, too, for the league, as it enters the home stretch while competing with the NFL, baseball and college football for media attention. The league’s greatest scorer … is back!

The MLS is treating this as a Jordanesque moment — the all-time great coming back for another go-round.

It’s not often remembered, but Michael Jordan was pretty good when he came back, the second time, at age 38 (!) and averaged better than 20 points in two seasons with the Washington Bullets.

If Landon can return at something approaching that level, the Galaxy will be happy, MLS will be happy, and we suspect Landon will be happy, too.

And something to think about: If Landon comes back and is effective … why could he not stick around another full season or two?

That would be a scenario U.S. soccer fans would enjoy.