is Mecanim Animator.Play(myState, level, myNormalizedTime) really a good alternative to Legacy animation normalizedTime?

Hello, I am struggling to convert some legacy animation code to Mecanim, and this relies heavily on setting the normalized time of the animation every frame in script.

I have seen examples like this, and it seems to work:

myAnimator.Play(myState, level, myNormalizedTime);

Is this the recommended way to do it in Mecanim?, it just smells like perhaps it is not something that is meant to be called every frame? I will have lots of these.

The other option I considered is polling the AnimationState normalized time every frame, and adjusting a Speed Multiplier Parameter to keep the animation going where I want it. But that is a lot of obscure code that also seems less-than-ideal. (Especially if I want to smooth it.)

Anybody have any experience with this?