Luke Littler broke down in tears on Saturday night moments after nearly hitting a nine-darter in his opening match at the World Championship at Alexandra Palace. 

Littler produced a stunning final set against Ryan Meikle, winning the three legs with 11, 10 and 11 darts respectively. In the second of those legs, he missed a nine-darter by a millimetre, sending a packed crowd in north London into delirium.

Straight after the match, he was interviewed on the stage by Sky’s Abigail Davies. When she asked Littler about that last set, the 17-year-old said: ‘I started off dead slow,’ before being obviously overcome with emotion.

It might well have been the amazing events of the last year in the teenager’s life that all came to a head — and frankly, who can blame him?

Scroll down Luke Littler’s Instagram grid over the past year and it is the stuff of childhood dreams. Forget a teenager living their best life. It’s another level entirely.

From the boyhood Manchester United fan meeting Sir Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford to being driven around Silverstone by Lando Norris and welcomed at the WWE headquarters in New York by champion Cody Rhodes. And there’s even more.

David Beckham casually sliding into his DMs, hanging out with John Cena and Max Verstappen, getting invited by James Maddison to watch Tottenham, hitting a 180 in front of the United squad at Carrington and appearing on The Jonathan Ross Show alongside artist Raye and actress Millie Bobby Brown.

Littler was even used by England in their Euro 2024 squad announcement video, starred in a cereal advertisement and was named in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list alongside Jude Bellingham and Arsenal’s Alessia Russo, at the age of 17.

And then you get to the actual darts. Since his remarkable run to the World Championship final last year as a 16-year-old, Littler has won 10 senior PDC (Professional Darts Corporation) titles and is the Premier League Darts, Grand Slam and World Series of Darts champion, going from 164th to fourth in the world rankings. Add in four nine-dart finishes.

A year ago, Littler had just shy of 4,000 followers before his first-round clash against Christian Kist. Going into his first-round contest against Ryan Meikle last night, Littler had well over a million. This time last year, his total winnings in the sport were four figures. Now, the boy from Warrington is a darting millionaire and unequivocally, the face of the sport.

On Tuesday, Littler was named BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year and came second behind Keely Hodgkinson for the main award.

Asked to describe his feelings, he said: ‘It shows how well I have done this year, not only for myself, but I have changed the sport of darts.’

The numbers alone tell the story. The World Championship final which he lost to Luke Humphries in January had the biggest non-football audience in Sky Sports’ 35-year existence with 4.8million people tuning in.

For this year’s tournament, there were six million ticket-purchase attempts alone for the 90,000 seats available while Sky have enjoyed record viewing figures for the Premier League and World Matchplay.

‘I know the amount of academies that have been opened in different locations, tickets selling out at Ally Pally in a few hours and the Premier League (of Darts) selling out — it just shows how much I have changed it,’ Littler added, in typically blunt fashion. The Junior Darts Corporation has doubled its number of academies from 55 to 111 in the past year.

One of the highlights of his stratospheric rise was when Aaron Ramsdale and Declan Rice were staying in the same hotel with Arsenal as Littler and asked security if they could take a picture with Littler. ‘Shouldn’t it be the other way around,’ quipped Littler.

Yet, a year on, he is still very much the boy wonder who spends his free time playing Football Manager on his Xbox and is often on Snapchat minutes before going on stage. ‘Off the oche, he’s a quiet lad,’ says darts referee, Russ Bray. ‘But on the oche, he’s a different animal.’

There is a scene in the Sky documentary Game of Throws shortly before Littler announced himself on the world stage with victory in the first round when he walks out to his theme tune rather shyly and simply utters ‘Wow’ when he looks out at the crowd.

He goes on to demolish his opponent and by the end the crowd are chanting ‘You’ve got school in the morning’ and Littler responds by pumping his chest.

The oche is the place where he feels most alive. For Littler, who had only ventured up and down the country for darts before, 2024 has taken him everywhere from Bahrain to New York to Amsterdam and sell-out crowds all around the UK.

Watch him play in full flow and there’s an aura about him, effortlessly working his way around the board. Even Humphries - No 1 in the world - admits that when Littler’s on form, nobody can touch him.

Littler’s hero Raymond van Barneveld said that ‘it was like a Formula One car against a normal car’ when he was knocked out in the fourth round last year.

There are sponsors piling in but deals have only been done with a handful of brands like BoohooMan and KP Nuts. Even now, he can’t be filmed in front of gambling branding when fulfilling his media duties due to his age.

Most of his TV appearances — he features in a Christmas special of Bullseye with Freddie Flintoff on ITV on Sunday night — are fairly reserved until he has a dart in his hand. He and his family had previously lived in a £180,000 two-bedroom semi-detached house in Cheshire but have since moved into a five-bed mansion with an indoor swimming pool and it speaks volumes of Littler that when he broke up with 21-year-old Eloise Milburn, he posted a message asking followers to stop giving grief to his ex.

Google announced that Littler was the most searched-for athlete in the UK this year, ahead of Bellingham and Lamine Yamal, while in the ‘general’ category, he was trending higher than Keir Starmer and behind only Kate Middleton and Donald Trump.

‘My wife wasn’t a massive darts fan but she always asks, “When’s that kid playing again?”,’ promoter Barry Hearn says. That is the effect Littler has.

Littler is a rarity in darts in that he’s never been anything else or had a ‘proper’ job. The next fortnight for him will be a failure unless he wins.

For the boy who first picked up a dart aged 18 months, the preparation will remain the same, with an hour to an hour-and-a-half of practice a day and plenty of ‘chilling’ on his own, though this time the pressure will certainly be different.

But as former world champion Rob Cross admitted recently: ‘Nothing worries Luke at all. He eats pressure for breakfast.’