It’s nice to see someone who is struggling score a big goal. Even if it was fairly easy. Even if his teammates did most of the work.

Like, say, Javier Hernandez, who scored in the 87th minute tonight to lift Real Madrid past Atletico Madrid and into the Champions League semifinals. It was the only goal in 180 minutes covering two legs.

Hernandez was the biggest thing in Mexico soccer just a few years ago, and is No. 2 all-time among Mexican scorers, and he was a fairly big deal with Manchester United, too, and then … he just lost it.

Which often happens to forwards/strikers. Today they have it. Next week it’s gone, and for most of the 86 minutes before he scored, it seemed as if we were watching the latest demonstration that Chicharito, or “Little Pea”, as it is translated from the Spanish, apparently had peaked at age 23.

Which is unfortunate, because Hernandez is 26.

He would not have played in this game had not both Gareth Bale and Karim Benzema been injured and unavailable. Leaving Cristiano Ronaldo as Real’s only available regular forward.

Coach Carlo Ancelotti had limited choices. It pretty much was Chicharito or Jese Rodriguez, neither of whom has played much this season. And it is interesting that rather than play both of them, and maintain Real’s 4-3-3 formation, Ancelotti flipped a coin and started Hernandez, and went with a 4-4-2.

For more than an hour, Chicharito looked less than stellar. He tended to be open, probably because if you’re Atletico you are worried, first, second and third, about Ronaldo and not so much about a rusty/perhaps washed up Javier Hernandez.

He had a couple of half chances. On one of those, his heavy shot meant to go inside the near post instead went five yards wide into the side netting. He did not look good.

Which is about when you begin to mull the notion that modern forwards peak at maybe 24 and certainly not at 27, which seems to be the zenith for most other athletes.

Consider Fernando Torres, who was on the Atletico bench when Chicharito scored. Torres is 31 and looks quite done; he has been bundled from Chelsea to AC Milan to Atletico in less than a year, and has two goals in 23 appearances.

Torres’s greatest season year was 2007-08, when he scored 33 goals in 46 matches for Liverpool — a season when he turned 24. His last really good year was two years later, when he turned 26.

Chicharito may be following a similar schedule.

He was huge at Guadalajara in 2009-10, scoring 21 goals in 28 matches as he turned 22.

He was huge at Manchester United in 2010-11, the season he turned 23, with 20 goals in 45 games, including 13 in 27 league matches. He was a key to United winning the Premier League.

He was OK the next year, more than OK in 2012-13, when he turned 25.

And then he ran into a wall.

He declined to nine goals in 35 matches in 2013-14, and United this season sent him on loan to Real, which was odd, because why would Real, with an all-star roster, take a guy United didn’t want anymore?

The goal tonight was his sixth in 17 appearances with Real. He is 26. Actually, his fade began earlier than did that of Fernando Torres.

Two guys is not a sample, though I am reminded that Bayern Munich told Landon Donovan he was too old to interest them, when he was 27.

But Chicharito’s goal had the feel of a last gasp. He played only because two other guys were out, and for 86 minutes he never looked like someone who could score a difficult goal.

And the winner came after Ronaldo and James Rodriguez had exchanged two passes, drawing away nearly everyone in the Atletico defense. Ronaldo rolled a pass over to Chicharito, who needed only to do two things: 1) make sure he was onside and 2) redirect a pass into the goal with his right foot, which apparently he can still do.

Chicharito was criticized by some for not acknowledging Ronaldo’s pass, and tearing off, “celebrating like he had won the World Cup”.

I don’t have a problem with that. The team caught up to him, eventually, as he knew it would.

And again, it had the feeling of “last big thing he will ever do”, and maybe Xavier “Chicharito” Hernandez felt it himself. If that was his last big moment, it was quite big.