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To accommodate golf’s return to the Olympics, which start Aug. 5, the year’s final major moved from its traditional mid-August date to this week.

No other major budged, of course, just the PGA.

Henrik Stenson prepares for the 2016 PGA Championship. (Getty Images)

And so if it feels like it was just the other day that golf had one of its greatest duels — Henrik Stenson shooting a record-tying 63 to beat Phil Mickelson in a thrilling finish to the British Open at Royal Troon — it’s because it pretty much was.

For most of the world’s best golfers, it’s been just days between majors.

“Another week, maybe if we had one more week off, given that we are coming from across the pond,” Jordan Spieth said. “It feels like a short week after long travel.”

Rory McIlroy — who like most here wasn’t at the Canadian Open last week — noted the strangeness of playing “two tournaments in a row and they are two majors.”

“I wish it wasn’t as condensed, especially going from the Open Championship straight in. But it’s hard to move The Open … I’d like to see the PGA just stay where it is in the middle of August, but if that can’t happen, we’re just going to work around it.”

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Work around it! Imagine telling those who pull the strings at Wimbledon that they will have to “work around” a schedule change.

Yet the PGA did it for the Olympics, which is ironic given the best players in the game won’t even be going to Rio.

McIlroy withdrew, as did world No. 1 Jason Day and the two top-ranked Americans, Dustin Johnson and Spieth. So the top four ranked players in the world are not playing and, for good measure, world No. 8 Adam Scott is skipping Rio, too.

The Games, obviously, will go on without them but the ultimate loser is the PGA, jammed into a date just because it was open and convenient for everyone else.

“It is what it is, and I’m looking forward to three weeks off after this and getting ready and fresh for the FedEx Cup Playoffs. And then The Ryder Cup,” McIlroy said.

Isn’t that the ultimate insult? Get the PGA over with, rest up and get ready for the rest of the year?

“It’s not ideal, I would say, at least for me,” Sergio Garcia said. “But this is going to happen once every four years at most. It’s something that we can deal with it and just kind of realize that it’s that way.”

But does it have to be this way?

Does the PGA have to be cheapened and feel like a normal Tour event?

Not if the powers that be realign the calendar in Olympic years.

Why not give the PGA the mid-March slot occupied this year by the World Golf Championships-Dell Match Play?

The boys with the green coats at Augusta won’t be so happy because they like to be the year’s first major but the Masters will always be the Masters. Nothing lessens that tournament. It’s the crown jewel and Holy Grail wrapped into one.

So why not kick a bone to the PGA and let it have its own moment in the sun? In Olympic years, golf would then have a big tournament every month from March through August, with the wannabe fifth major, The Players, in May.

And it would be good for golf because majors shouldn’t be minor.

Play at the PGA Championship begins Thursday at Baltusrol Golf Club, just west of New York City.

— Golf writer Robert Lusetich is covering the PGA Championship for Sporting News. He is the author of “UNPLAYABLE: An Inside Account of Tiger’s Most Tumultuous Season.”