As much as I'm not a man of science as I am a man of language and history, I will say that in essence there are two ways you can look at time - either as a measurement, or as a state of scientific development. Both are connected in the sense they are both time, yet they also cover two individual topics.
Time being defined as a case of measurement, such as the actual seconds and minutes we use to measure time, can be considered not necessarily real simply because we came up with that as a unit of measurement all on it's own.
However, this connects to the idea of what time is necessarily.
What does time measure? Time, obviously.
Weight is to weight as time is to time - a rock may not actually be labeled with a certain, set restriction on what it can be known as, but at the same time it does indeed have weight attributed to it. This can also be applied to the universe, in a sense that while time is not physical as a measurement, it is physical in the sense it exists.
Of course, this takes us back to the question of what time essentially is. When you bring it in to a sense, time is the consecutive passing and movement of energy which provides an essential and continuous series of events that is, at a sense, ever-continuing. You can't argue the existence of energy if you argue against the existence of time, because both are intertwined in the fact energy
causes time.