Yesterday’s final was a baseline rally between reverence and melancholy. We observed waves of silence enveloping the court, depriving the grass and the players alike of parabolic oxygen. Carlos Alcaraz needs the crowd to breathe, though not nearly as much as he needs the player on the other side of the net. Jannik Sinner needs no one, just a healthy body and racket that won’t break under a beating. Yet, as always, the truth lies beyond our perception.
Anyone who watched the match possesses an inherent understanding of the passage of time, an understanding that these finals are few and far between over the course of a lifetime. To compensate for our fear of endings, we stretched five and a half hours into five and a half weeks. We expected a moment to simultaneously exist in isolation and as the catalyst for a chain reaction, a confirmation that we will, unequivocally, witness history again. And of course, we will, whether it be in the same capacity or with a different pair of rivals.
Here exists the blurred lines between reality and our narratives. A true understanding of the rivalrous current flowing between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner is impossible to extract. We try, over and over again, to extricate a sentence, or its absence, of what one says about the other. We want to know what it means, if it means anything at all.
The rivalry and the narrative are inextricable, and yet it is not our story to write as long as it is lived. For now, all we can do is watch.