It’s 3 p.m. on a sleepy Sunday in Pepperell, Massachusetts, and miracles of the human variety are happening 3,400 miles away on an orange tennis court in Paris, France. 

There, Spanish wunderkind Carlos Alcaraz has just pried his way to victory over Italian virtuoso Jannik Sinner in the final of the 2025 French Open, and the handsome Euro crowd is in fits and hysterics. They’ve probably just witnessed the greatest tennis match in the sport’s history—and so have I, though I’m sitting on my couch in an old Champion shirt and paint-stained shorts.

It’s hard not to be romantic about these things.

Growing up in a household that prioritized tennis in the same way others value God (or at least a very good steak), my love of the sport was always inexplicably connected to my dad’s. This isn’t to say I never appreciated the game for its natural beauty and majesty, but unlike him, I didn’t spend my childhood on sun-beaten courts in Chelmsford, tooling around from dawn-to-dusk on sweaty summer days and idolizing Pete Sampras and Ivan Lendl. Like literature (the foundation of his career as an English teacher), tennis provided my dad an outlet for breathing, and an arena to watch the dramatic sophistication of the written word come to life. 

When we watched his hero Roger Federer walk baseline tightropes and hit spiraling one-hand backhands, I also watched him. When we watched his nemesis Novak Djokovic break records and scoop up acclaim as the “greatest tennis player to ever live,” I also watched him. To watch tennis with Bryan Desjardins is to watch a man hooked up to a defibrillator and shocked repeatedly for three hours, and to live with him is to live with a lifelong believer in the power of a little green ball. 

Therefore, when I witnessed the five-and-a-half-hour stunner that was Alcaraz vs. Sinner, and when I whooped and hollered from the very base of my soul everytime one of them outdid the other, I became increasingly aware of a curious phenomenon:

My fandom was growing legs. 

Here I’d been, for twenty years, watching the players my dad had been watching before me, and always riding along in the sidecar. For the uninitiated, right now, we’re at the very tail-end of an all-time era of men’s tennis that saw Federer, Djokovic, and Rafael Nadal dominate each other in stunning fashion for the better part of two decades. There is simply no sporting equivalent, then or now, for this level of simultaneous greatness, and to pull a simile would be to cobble together slobbery fan fiction (i.e. MJ, LeBron, and Kobe all competing against each other in their primes). Having met the three of them as old men, I was scared I would never get the opportunity to witness such class with my own two eyes. The follow-up generation to this “Big Three” turned out to be a flop—the tennis equivalent of Marvel branding Falcon as the new Captain America—and I certainly couldn’t claim excitement in watching Alexander Zverev and Stefanos Tsitsipas and Dominic Thiem fight through frequent injuries for cheap victories. Even worse was watching the occasional underdog sneak through and get slaughtered by Djoker’s savage tornado of cardio and mind games.

Like “Saturday Night Live,” I assumed I had missed the boat and would have to settle. Sometimes, when things got really helpless and Scandanavian stiff Casper Ruud started making Grand Slam finals, I thought about giving up tennis for good.

And yet here I am, staring down the barrel of a Google Doc, my faith strengthened beyond my wildest dreams. I can’t say I watched Carlos Alcaraz play in Challenger tournaments as a 15-year-old, but now, watching him in the midst of his heart-pounding ascent—that currently finds him at a mere 22 years of age (and me at 20)—I can proudly say that I have a stake in my own generation of tennis players. 

There’s something baldly brilliant about the way he bludgeons his way through endless rallies, and something equally brilliant in the way Jannik Sinner harnesses nuclear power from his stringbean physique. Sunday’s match was a reminder of all these strengths—and in the case of Sinner, who blew a two-set lead, some of the weaknesses as well—but it was also a kick in the behind, and a bold rallying cry for a new era. 

For the first time in a long time, it feels like we’re watching something wonderfully unpredictable unfold on the humble courts of planet Earth, something akin to two great artists joining forces and madly dragging oil pastels across a blank canvas.

I can only hope that, no matter how the artwork unfolds, it includes few injuries and loads of great matches. We the spectators, the young and old, the veteran and new, the remote and netside, deserve it just as much as they do.