Instead of the “What’s North of the North Pole” analogy, I like to offer the following analogy:
Science can tell us many things about objects that weigh 100 grams and things that weigh 10 grams and so on, all the way down to the most infinitesimal weights. But science has nothing to say at all about objects that weigh -1 grams, not because science is ignorant about the problem, but because the question is ill posed. If you ask why the sharp dividing line exists at exactly 0 grams between productive inquiry and ill posed problem space (as opposed to say, 18 grams or -4 grams), the answer is rather obviously that it’s embedded in the fundamental structure of the universe.
Similarly, we are able to speculate productively about things that happened microseconds after the big bang but not at all about things that happened 1 second before because “1 second before the big bang” is a similarly ill posed concept. Our language doesn’t allow for accurate encapsulations of the topic so we say things like “time was created at the big bang”. In reality, time was “created” at the Big Bang in the same way mass is “created” at 0 grams.