Tennis has a way of making the first half-hour of a match feel like a verdict. Mirra Andreeva, nineteen years old and the reigning French Open champion, walked out on Wednesday and won the first seven points against Coco Gauff. Seven. Not a game — seven consecutive points, which in a sport where holding serve is the baseline expectation is the equivalent of a boxer landing every punch in the opening minute. The first set took twenty-six minutes. It went 6-2. Gauff, the fourth seed and the 2023 champion on this court, looked like she was still in the tunnel.

If you had turned it off there — and on a Wednesday afternoon with the day’s other quarterfinals stacking up, plenty of people did — you would have gone to bed believing Andreeva was in the semifinal.

The Second Set

Gauff, by her own account afterward, made one decision. She said she thought, during the break after the first set, about Frances Tiafoe coming back from two sets down on the same grounds the day before. “So, honestly, I was just trying to literally leave the court with no regrets.” And, more compactly: “I think the motto of the match is just to fight.” It is not an elaborate tactical philosophy. It is what you say when the tactics have not worked and what remains is the refusal to lose.

She fought her way to a second-set tiebreak. The tiebreak is where this match will be remembered.

Somewhere in the middle of it, Gauff and Andreeva played a thirty-nine-shot rally, and Gauff won it, to go up 5-3. That should have been the turn. It was not. Andreeva took the next three points and, at 6-5, had a match point. Then, with Gauff at the net, she threaded a backhand pass for a second one at 7-6. Two chances to close out the fourth seed, with the first set already banked.

She sent a forehand long on the first. Gauff took the second away from her, and the next point, and the one after that. Tiebreak: Gauff, 9-7.

The Third Set

There is not much to say about the third set because there was not much of it. Gauff won it 6-2. Andreeva, who twenty-six minutes into the match had looked like the best player in the world, spent the last half-hour looking like a teenager who had just watched a semifinal leave through a door she was holding open. Which is what she was.

Final score: 2-6, 7-6(7), 6-2. It is the kind of scoreline that tells the whole story if you read it slowly and no story at all if you read it fast.

The Company She Keeps

Andreeva is in good company this week, which will be no comfort. Madison Keys led 5-0 in a deciding set and lost seven straight games. Ben Shelton saved the night by beating Alcaraz in a fifth-set tiebreak that ended at 3:33 AM. Three of the four quarterfinals on Ashe on Tuesday went to match tiebreaks. This has been a fortnight in which the lead has meant almost nothing and the last few points have meant everything, and Andreeva — who has more talent than almost anyone in the draw and less experience than almost anyone in the last eight — got the full lesson in one evening.

She is nineteen. She has a major. She will be back on this court, probably many times, and she will probably win here eventually, and when she does someone will replay the forehand that sailed long on the first match point and she will have to smile about it. That is the price of admission for a career this good this early.

What Gauff Gets

A semifinal, on Thursday night, against Elena Rybakina — who beat Zheng Qinwen 3-6, 6-1, 6-4 earlier in the day and in doing so clinched the world No. 1 ranking, the first of her career. Gauff’s preview was economical: “Elena, well, she’s the new world No. 1, so it’s going to be a tough match.”

It will be. But Gauff has now won a quarterfinal in which she lost the first seven points, the first set in twenty-six minutes, and faced two match points, and she is playing in a tournament where that appears to be the only way anyone advances. Fight, as the motto goes. It is not a plan. This week it has been enough.

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