How to force display of a specific page of paged data
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-&gt;getPager();
$defaultPageNum = round($cnt/$pager-&gt;getItemsPerPage());
$pager-&gt;setCurrentPage($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?