Fair enough, I read on a different website and also saw a string of tweets from Kevin Yanes that said it was retroactive. There seems to be a lot of confusion over the whole quest

I saw that post too from Kevin Yanes. He said anything with a rank was tracked all season. I think what he meant was the 2nd step, Reach rank of Heroic, was tracked. That's the only thing I can think of. Plenty of players have made it to the last step and have confirmed what DMG04 said.