Serena Williams went out the same way she came in: fighting like hell

As Serena Williams stood one tiebreak away from her demise in the second set of the breathless, unforgettable final match of her career, a deafening wall of noise on Arthur Ashe Stadium punctuated every minor victory she achieved. She had led 5-3 in the first set, only for her lead to crumble. When she established a 5-2 lead in the second set, her four set points evaporated in a flash. Each time she came close, she was arrested by tension, rust, nerves.

Nothing went her way, but Willams did what she has done for 27 years: she fought. She tore into forehands, her loud, piercing grunts following every act. She desperately sprinted for every last ball, she pumped her fists and hollered at herself in encouragement. Somehow, she dragged herself over the line in the second set tiebreak, crunching a searing forehand winner off a 20-shot rally, engineering one of her final moments of defiance.

In the end, it was not enough. Williams’ final iconic win was to be two days earlier against second seed, Anett Kontaveit, in her second-round match. But across the final three hours and five minutes she spent on court as a professional tennis player, as she succumbed to Ajla Tomljanović, 7-5, 6-7(4), 6-1, every last second of that moment was spent desperately searching for a way through.

Her final vanquisher, Tomljanović, is a much improved Croatian-born Australian player who has spent most of her career ranked between around 38 and 80. There are no parallels to the noise, the spectacle and the drama that has marked every night of Williams’ Arthur Ashe residence, but Tomljanović has had more experience with wildly partisan crowds than most after grinding Emma Raducanu into submission in the fourth round of Wimbledon last year.

But that