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The shapes and the silhouettes are the same. The movements are effortlessly familiar. The way she gathers the ball before she serves: not so much bouncing it as toying with it, batting it around her ankles, as if considering what an appropriate punishment might be. All this is as it ever was, like the words of a song you know by heart. So why does it still feel so strange?

It is a little before half past seven on a warm Wimbledon night when Serena Williams comes back from the dead. And no, this is not literally true (although she has cheated death more than once), but not a million miles away from what it feels like. Some spectators have brought old photos of her, and are holding them up as she walks on to court, like mourners at a vigil. As if they’ve managed to summon her through the force of their collective devotion.

And of course Serena devotion was always tonally different to other forms of tennis fandom, always skirting a fine line between the earthly and divine. Throw in a four-year absence and perhaps it’s not surprising that the overriding emotion here is not euphoria but a kind of disbelief. Four years off at any level of sport is usually terminal. Four years off at the age of 40, in grand slam singles tennis: this is about as close to sporting death as it is possible to get.

There is none of the tomfoolery and wisecracking you often get from Centre Court crowds in the evening. There’s a reverence here, a longing, perhaps even a moist eye or two. If you’re a millennial or younger, this is your childhood right here, a walking capsule of memories and time: where you were when you watched her, what you were doing, who you were doing it with.

Naturally, the game has moved on. None of the 127 other players in the draw here has ever faced her in a Wimbledon singles match. The line judges have gone, and more than once she stares quizzically at a close call. And the opponent eyeing her up a little nervously across the net was born in 2006, by which point she had won seven of her grand slam titles. Maya Joint is 20, and as far from Williams in age as Williams is from Martina Navratilova.

In recent months, when she quietly returned to the drug‑testing pool and artfully dodged the question in interviews, she wasn’t being coy. In February, when she called her old coach Rennae Stubbs and tentatively started hitting some balls in Florida, she still wasn’t sure. Does it matter whether or not she can still win? And if not, then what’s the point?

After all, she never did this for flowers or pats on the head. Not for the air miles or the gushing tributes. The record books will not record her bravery and resilience here, the way she saved two match points, the screaming winners into the corner, the irrepressible accuracy of her serve, the way Joint – coming into this game with one tour win in six months – played her best match of the year. For the ultimate competitor, a loss will always be a loss.

There comes a moment, at 5-5 in the second set. She’s 0-40 down, wins four straight points, closes out the hold, and she lets out a roar. And Centre Court roars with her. You remember Novak Djokovic confiding that he’s seen her in the gym more this tournament than when she was in her prime. And you realise this wasn’t just for her own enjoyment. This wasn’t just for her kids or for kicks. This wasn’t a “vanity exercise”, as her comeback was described in the Spectator, a small magazine for small people. When you are the greatest tennis player in history, you leave the house with a clear purpose.

Perhaps the greatest testament to Williams here is the level she managed to bring out of Joint, low on confidence and plummeting down the rankings, but young and hungry and ambitious and desperately trying to stay on this spinning wheel. Whose primary motive is very much not “to go out there and enjoy herself”. And who will now for ever be able to tell her grandchildren about the day she beat Serena Williams on Centre Court.

At one point, as the match begins to ebb from her grasp, Williams lets out not a grunt but something closer to a cry, a kind of refusal. And though we have all seen her lose before, seen her suffer before, there is something powerful about this moment: a sense of all the time that has passed, the way it makes us weak and sentimental, the way things start to slip away.

The shapes and silhouettes are familiar. But we are all older now, and there’s not a thing anyone can do about it.