"If not for Carlos Alcaraz's deltoid exhibition, his irrepressible fluidity, and the occasional choice Spanish murmuring, all 24,000 of us at Arthur Ashe Stadium might've sworn that the young man lolling around the court last week was a bad impersonator... Prodigy doesn't have to always equal perfection, but the end result shouldn't be whatever that was."
"Lightning struck again the very next night. Novak Djokovic fell in four sets. The most immovable object to ever grace a court met some little known Aussie force and lost... Play the match 100 times and 99 of them end with the big Serb on top. This was that one in the hundred."
"Coco Gauff arrived in Flushing prepared for a drawn-out fight but not the opponent: herself. Fourteen winners to 19 double-faults... At 19 she dispatched everything in her path to capture the U.S. Open title -the first Grand Slam victory in a likely decades-long reign. A year later, at 20, she trips over her own feet."
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