AUGUSTA, Ga. — Every April, with the Georgia azaleas beginning to pop, we get the Masters. For the golf junkie, Masters week is a gift. It’s a rite of springtime for those of us from the northeast who’ve been waiting for golf season to begin after too many long, dark weeks of winter. 

Along with being the most famous of the four major golf championships and giving out the green jacket to the winner at Augusta National, we also get a Masters within the Masters. 

It’s one of the many elements to the week that make this tournament unlike any other. 

On Saturday morning, before play was suspended for the second consecutive day because of inclement weather, there were compelling and moving events taking place on the golf course that had nothing to do with what will be the final outcome of the final round on Sunday and who will be fitted for a green jacket as the tournament winner. 

You had Fred Couples becoming the oldest player ever to make the cut at the Masters. 

You also had 64-year-old Augusta native Larry Mize and 65-year-old Sandy Lyle closing out their respective Masters careers. 

Mize, the 1987 winner with that memorable walk-off chip-in to break Greg Norman’s heart, as the defending champion, slipped the green jacket over the broad shoulders of Lyle when he won the tournament in 1988. 

Couples, who already owns a share of the Masters record for most consecutive cuts made at 23 (a mark that Tiger Woods tied on Saturday) beat out Bernhard Langer by a few months at age 63 years, six months and five days. Couples had missed the cut his previous four Masters starts. 

“I am excited to make the cut,’’ Couples said Saturday after the completion of his second round. “That’s why I come here. The last four years have been really mediocre golf. Maybe one year I was semi-close to making the cut. But that’s my objective, and I did it. Now I can screw around and play 36 holes for fun. 

“Am I going to look thrilled to play 18 holes in this afternoon?’’ Couples joked before his third round began. “No, I’m a wimp. I’m an old wimp, but I’m excited to play.’’ 

While Couples was making history, a Masters era quietly ended Saturday morning when Lyle and Mize played their final holes of competitive golf. They both missed the cut by a mile, but that hardly mattered. 

When second-round play was suspended by bad weather on Friday, Lyle, who finished 20-over and hasn’t made a Masters cut since 2014, was on the 18th green waiting to putt. He said he was “seconds’’ away from putting out on Friday when the horn sounded suspending play. 

Asked how he spent Friday night, awaiting his unconventional morning curtain call, Lyle said, “A lot of tequila and a bit of whiskey tasting at about 1 o’clock this morning.’’ 

Lyle, who had 12 feet for par when he returned to the 18th green Saturday morning, used a replica putter to the one he used in ’88 that Ping had made for him before this Masters. His caddie, Ken Martin, made a fun ceremonial hand-off of it to Lyle before he made his final putts. 

“I had it presented to me by my caddie and the old royal, ‘Here’s the sword, wipe the blood off,’ that kind of thing,” Lyle joked. 

Another cool moment came when Lyle, who played 42 Masters, stayed around after signing his card and doing a couple of interviews. He returned to the 18th green about 30 minutes after he’d completed his round to be there when Mize finished his 40th Masters. 

“I obviously know what’s going through his mind and it was just a welcome to a new era, I suppose, for the both of us,’’ Lyle said. 

Mize, who finished 15-over and last made the cut in 2017, called seeing Lyle on 18 “very special,’’ adding, “Sandy’s a good friend, a great champion, and to finish off with him is pretty cool. Yeah, I liked that.’’ 

Mize, who used to work the manual scoreboard at the Masters when he was a teenager and later became the only Augusta native to win a green jacket, called his last go-round “just unbelievable, surreal,’’ before adding, “Words don’t do it justice to have won here and played here for 40 years.’’ 

Russell Henley, a Georgia naïve, waited for Mize on 18. 

“He’s been like a mentor and father figure for me,’’ Henley said. 

Henley exchanged a few words with Mize as he walked off 18 for the last time as a competitor. 

“I just said I loved him,’’ Henley said. “That was awesome … 40 years … so cool.’’ 

Scenes like that are precisely what make the Masters so cool, beyond the green jacket, the perfect golf course, the best players in the world competing and the cheap pimento cheese sandwiches. 

The Masters within the Masters is worth the price of admission on its own.