Vicky Mboko drew a tough opponent for her first U.S. Open

This is an excerpt from The Buzzer, which is CBC Sports' daily email newsletter. Stay up to speed on what's happening in sports by subscribing here.

For a minute there, it looked like 2025 would go down as a pretty forgettable year for Canadian tennis.

Sure, there were several nice victories in lower-tier events: Felix Auger-Aliassime won a couple of ATP 250 tournaments back in January, Denis Shapovalov grabbed his first ATP 500 title in Dallas and added a 250-pointer in Mexico, Gabriel Diallo captured his first ATP trophy by winning a 250 in the Netherlands, and Leylah Fernandez won a WTA 500 in Washington, D.C. in mid-July for the biggest of her four career titles.

But, heading into the twin Canadian Open tournaments in Montreal and Toronto at the end of last month, no Canadian singles player had reached even the semifinals of a WTA or ATP 1000 — the most prestigious and lucrative tier of full-field events apart from the Grand Slams. And the Slams have not been great either: no Canadian men advanced past the second round at the Australian Open, the French Open or Wimbledon, while the best result in women's singles was a third-round showing by Fernandez at the Aussie.

In short, when the bright lights turned on and the competition got tougher, Canada's players did not level up.

Of course, that all changed a couple weeks ago when Vicky Mboko stunned the tennis world by winning the women's Canadian Open in Montreal — a WTA 1000 event. Ranked 88th in the world going in, the 18-year-old from Burlington, Ont., became the youngest woman since Serena Williams in 1999 to knock off four Grand Slam winners in the same tournament. Mboko's magical run to her first WTA title included upsets of then world No. 2 Coco Gauff and, in