How to force display of a specific page of paged data

Question

I'm displaying a table of dated items ordered from old to new and am using the full pager. How can I force my page to initially display those items that are current ie. on initial load, display the page containing items that are most current (which might be ?page=17). The user can then page back/forwards to get older or newer items. Drupal 8.

Answer 1

I'm half way there!

In hook_views_pre_build(\Drupal\views\ViewExecutable $view) I figured that the $cnt item was the most current; from there it was a simple matter to calculate which page that item would appear on and to set that as the current page.

$pager = $view->getPager();
$defaultPageNum = round($cnt/$pager->getItemsPerPage());
$pager->setCurrentPage($defaultPageNum);

This works like a charm; however, the pager links at the bottom of the page do not auto-magically update and still indicate that I'm on page 1 (instead of page 62).

Anyone know how I get these links to update?