In tennis, it is not enough to win; you have to keep winning. It is not even enough to be the greatest of all time; someone new is coming. In early June, at the French Open, Carlos Alcaraz played the match of his life, one of the best ever, and was crowned champion; only five weeks later, at Wimbledon, he had to try to do it again, against Jannik Sinner, the same man who had nearly beat him.

Centre Court, at Wimbledon, is a monument to tradition, to repetition. When Sinner and Alcaraz walked onto the grass on Sunday afternoon, they stepped in and out of the shadows of the four men who had preceded them, who had won sixty-nine Grand Slam titles between them, just as those men had been shadowed by the legends who had come before them. Together, Sinner and Alcaraz had won the past six Grand Slams, and that day one of them would win the seventh. The crowd was full of pinkening cheeks, and blazers and mid-calf-length dresses, in the manner of people performing a particular version of the past. At one point, play was stopped when a champagne cork flew onto the court; the umpire politely asked the crowd to refrain from popping bottles while the players were serving. It was a joke—only at Wimbledon! But it was not only ridiculous. It also felt oddly out of step with the seriousness of what was happening on the court.

The crowd wanted, and expected, nothing less than history: a match for the ages, a match that would measure up to the one that had happened only a month before. It was an impossible task, even for two players accustomed to so much pressure. For much of the first set, the play was at a high level but not particularly special. But then, at the end of the set, there it was: an unimaginable series of shots. Down a set point, at 4-5, Sinner hit a solid serve, and then followed it by ripping a wide forehand, pulling Alcaraz toward the tramlines. Alcaraz hit a deep defensive shot and recovered quickly, dancing across the court with fleet little steps, and ran around his backhand to hit a forehand down the line. It was a decent shot, but opened up the court for Sinner, who obliged, hitting a low, flat crosscourt shot. Alcaraz slid across the grass a good ten feet into a defensive forehand slice, and somehow quickly recovered to the center of the baseline; Sinner then smartly wrong-footed him with his reply. But Alcaraz, staying low, his legs at once light on the grass and straining with effort, caught his balance and hit a forehand sharply across the court. Sinner was there to smash a running forehand down the line—a winner in any moment but this one. Alcaraz sprinted and slid to block the ball back when it was already behind him—but with enough strength and wrist control that the ball fluttered across the net and died on the bounce. Set to Alcaraz. On set point in the second, it was Sinner’s turn to make a miracle—a running forehand hit so hard and low, and at such an angle, that I cursed softly in wonder when I saw it.

That’s the rivalry, contained in two points: the creativity and improvisational feel of Alcaraz; the crushing technical brilliance of Sinner. The duel already seemed so natural as to feel almost inevitable. But what followed was less dramatic: the better player won. Sinner’s smothering ground strokes and the speed of his shots started to move Alcaraz out of his unpredictable patterns into something more subdued and normal. Alcaraz’s first serve, which has been improving, started to falter, and Sinner was able to pounce on the return. Sinner’s serves, on the other hand, grew more precise, sending up clouds of chalk dust as they strafed the lines, and his ultimate 4–6, 6–4, 6–4, 6–4 victory, his first win against Alcaraz since 2023, began to seem more and more certain. It was clinical, which isn’t to say it wasn’t beautiful.

Sinner has the length and grace of an N.B.A. guard; there is a liquidity to his movements that underscores the coolness of his demeanor. Alcaraz works in bursts; together, they complement each other. Alcaraz plays with more variety—bruising ground strokes, feathery drop shots. But the drop shot, on Sunday, wasn’t quite the spontaneous miracle that it can sometimes be, and the inspiration that Alcaraz seems to thrive on was not quite there—deadened, perhaps, by the bravery and mastery that Sinner showed. At the end of the match, Sinner appeared relieved as much as happy, characteristically even-keeled.

It had been a strange tournament, by turns brilliant and disheartening. Many of the top players were out before the second week, having fallen victim to the vicissitudes of the slick grass, to the parity and depth on tour, and, in some cases, to themselves. Some of them talked about their despondency, their sense of being trapped in the relentless cycle of the tour, in which meaning can be hard to come by; even the best have to grow accustomed to disappointment. “Losing sucks, you know?” the No. 1 woman, Aryna Sabalenka, said to reporters after losing to Amanda Anisimova in the semifinals. “You always feel like you want to die—you don’t want to exist anymore, and this is the end of your life.”

There’s a great tradition in sports of being driven by a fear, or a hatred, of that feeling. But the finalists, at least, seemed to be spared from that outlook. Anisimova had taken an extended break from the tour following the death of her father, and facing extreme burnout; at the start of the 2024 Australian Open, shortly after she came back, she was barely in the top five hundred, yet she talked about how much more she enjoyed the game now. Iga Świątek’s surge of dominance on grass came after she finally relinquished her dominance on clay, losing in mystifying ways, and she has spoken of the joy of playing free of expectations. Still, a measure of the high stakes came during the women’s final, when Anisimova was clearly overwhelmed by the magnitude of the moment, and Świątek defeated her, 6–0, 6–0, in under an hour.

“I had a very tough loss in Paris,” Sinner said after his win on Sunday, during the on-court ceremony. “But, at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter how you win or you lose the important tournaments. You just have to understand what you did wrong. Trying to work on that—that’s exactly what we did. We tried to accept the loss and then just kept working. And this is, for sure, why I’m holding this trophy here.” It’s the kind of cliché that athletes say all the time. Sinner seemed to mean it, and to live by it; he had nearly been knocked out of the tournament during the quarterfinals, when Grigor Dimitrov had taken the first two sets and had the match in control before blowing out a pectoral muscle. Sinner was lucky to escape and he knew it. He didn’t take it as a win, he said.

It matters: one walks away with the trophy, the other in pain. It matters so much that we seem to need success to justify the desire not to need it. And yet, watching Sinner and Alcaraz engage in such a display, at the edge of their limits, offered a glimpse of a different paradigm for competition—a contest not fuelled by hyper-aggression or enmity but by something transcendent, capable of belonging to both competitors at once. Let the crowd drink champagne, I thought to myself. Just give me this, which feels new. ♦