The signal that this would be a long night for Novak Djokovic arrived early.
Down a game and serving early in the first set on Rod Laver Arena, the court he owned just a few short years ago, the 24-time Grand Slam champion did what he has done so many times before.
He blasted a serve down the middle, sending his opponent into a desperate lunge.
Somehow, Jannik Sinner managed to connect his strings with the ball, lofting a wobbly return that gave Djokovic the chance for an easy putaway.
He rotated into that textbook open stance and fired an inside-out forehand at the corner.
Just one problem. Sinner read it all the way. He stretched out his left leg toward the tramline, and, with a quick flick of his arms, redirected an open-stance backhand down the line as though it was the easiest shot in the tennis arsenal rather than one of the hardest.
Two points later, Sinner had the first break of the night and appeared to be on his way. There was still plenty of tennis to play. It was a Grand Slam semifinal after all, Djokovic’s fifth in a row, a remarkable achievement at 38.
But surely this one would go like the last four, without him winning a set against a new generation of stars.
Someone forgot to mention that to Djokovic. It started with glimpses of the old magic, and ended with Djokovic roaring into the Melbourne night after beating the world No. 2, and his recent nemesis, 3-6, 6-3, 4-6, 6-4, 6-4 to reach an Australian Open final against Carlos Alcaraz.
That clockwork backhand that can send back balls all night long. The court vision of the ultimate master of using every inch. The lung-busting defense. The return that pelted Sinner’s toes. Beginning in the second set, the ball started flying off Djokovic’s racket as it did when he used to get the better of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer.
And then the special stuff showed up, too. In the second set, leading 4-2 after a 40-minute surge and fighting to keep his lead with Sinner clawing at his neck, he wandered over to the side of the court, grabbed his towel and puked over the video board.
Without even a time violation, he cracked an ace to save a break point, and then another to get to game point, and then a service winner to seal the game. He headed to his chair, where he grabbed a towel and puked a little more.
Two games later, he roped a forehand across the court to clinch the set, sending the stadium into a nostalgic frenzy.
Then it was time for a toilet break, and a prayer that he could somehow make this level of tennis continue for two more sets. At a tournament he has won 10 times, under the lights on a cool evening on the banks of the Yarra River, the conditions could not have been more perfect.
Nearly everyone figured he couldn’t get closer than shouting distance of a win over the two-time defending champion from Italy who was once his protégé.
He did a whole lot more than that, scaring the daylights out of Sinner across over four hours of frightening tennis, saving break points with lightning serves, lacing full-extension forehands from yesteryear.
Where did it come from?
Maybe it came from what happened at the 48-minute mark, Djokovic sent a pretty straightforward forehand sailing long and screamed in frustration, shaking his arms at the night in a way that only someone fighting to believe that his time has not passed does.
It was just the start of big gestures on a night when Djokovic made little attempt to hide his distress.
He leaned on his racket between points throughout the second set. After one point that mimicked a shuttle drill, he put his fist to his sternum and winced, like an old man who thought he might be entering a coronary episode.
He wobbled over to his bench midway through the third set, after nearly breaking Sinner’s serve. He came up just short in more ways than one, tossing his racket on the side and falling onto the bench it as though he was collapsing onto a couch after a night out.
He draped a towel over his face and didn’t move for nearly half a minute. Early in the fourth set, he started contorting his legs in yoga-like stretches between points
Maybe a quicker ending would have been for the best. As much as he claims to still love competing for the biggest prizes in the sport at the sport’s four Grand Slams, Djokovic has appeared somewhere between cranky and miserable for much of his time at the tournament, in no small part because until Friday night, his tennis was far from vintage Djokovic.
He got so cranky during his third-round win over Botic van de Zandschulp that he smacked a ball that came within inches of hitting a ballkid in the head. A little to the right, and Djokovic surely would have been defaulted.
He caught a serious break when his fourth-round opponent, Jakub Menšík, another protégé who beat Djokovic in last year’s Miami Open final last year, withdrew before their match with an abdominal injury.
For a year, Djokovic had complained of being out of gas and injured at the deep end of tournaments, when Sinner or Alcaraz appeared on the other side of the net. Now the gift of three days of rest in the middle of a Grand Slam had fallen out of the sky. The offerings from the tennis gods were only getting started.
In the quarterfinals Wednesday, Lorenzo Musetti was blowing him away. Djokovic appeared old and slow and lost and out of rhythm and, in his words, “on my way home.” Or he was… until Musetti suffered what he said he thought was a torn muscle near his groin.
Djokovic had not won a set in five days, but somehow was in his 54th Grand Slam semifinal. He seemed almost embarrassed about it. Then he got snippy with a journalist who neglected to mention his 24 Grand Slam titles and decade of domination when he asked him to compare his years of chasing Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal with these seasons of chasing Sinner and Alcaraz.
“I find it a little bit disrespectful that you kind of miss out on what happened in between,” Djokovic bristled defensively. He seemed to be trying to remind the world that no matter what unfolded Friday night against Sinner — and chances were it wasn’t going to end well for him — he was still the best there’d ever been and would be for some time.
Sometime between then and roughly 9 p.m. Friday, Djokovic appeared to have decided that the best way to remind people of that would be to turn the semifinal into a street fight. No one has had more of those than he has.
If he could just move Sinner into that region of stress, maybe he would look across the net and see the version of Djokovic that Djokovic wants to believe he can will back into existence.
Sinner seemed to snuff out Djokovic’s hopes for a journey back in time at the end of a third set he barely survived. He’d needed a needle-threading backhand pass down the line to stay even early. In the 10th game, Djokovic flew two makeable balls long to give Sinner three set points. On the second, Sinner caught up with a drop shot and Djokovic popped a lob long.
Sinner needed one more set. It took Djokovic one game to flip the script, breaking Sinner in the first game.
From there, Djokovic made like it was 2015 and rode his serve and forehand all the way to 2-2.
He landed 79 percent of his first serves in the fourth set, sending the speed gun up near 130 mph. He won 77 percent of points on his first serve and seemed to come up with a near-perfect one every time he needed it. When Sinner sent a forehand into the net in the 10th game, Djokovic had all the momentum and one set to play for a spot in the finals.
How does a man hold back the relentless surge of time, along with a 24-year-old tennis wrecking machine? Having a serve and a forehand that function as battering rams for a night is a pretty good start.
Those two weapons got him past Alcaraz in the 2024 Paris Olympics final, his last great win for a big title, especially two fierce forehands in the second-set tiebreak. Just when Sinner looked to be rounding a final corner midway through the fifth set, Djokovic found two of those forehands, rocking Sinner back on his heels.
Somehow, a little past 1 a.m., Djokovic was smacking the ball more fiercely than one of the guys with one of the fiercest forehands on the planet.
Sinner pushed a forehand wide. Djokovic had his break. He pumped a fist in the air. Now it was time for the serve and that relentless belief to do the rest.
He’d already saved five break points in the set. In a flash, he was down 0-40 and needed to save three more. Done, putting his total at 16 for the night. Two points later, another ace. One game from salvation.
A big first serve got it started. A couple of errors from Sinner got him to the edge. Then, on his second match point, another big serve gave him another one of those big short forehands. Again, Sinner was there to send it back and grab a lifeline.
So back to the serve he went, pounding one Sinner couldn’t reach. And then a last backhand wide from Sinner, and Djokovic was over the line, the ocean pushed back for one more night.
