Rafael Nadal vs. Gilles Müller was a thrilling endurance test, until it became painful

Remarkable things don’t happen on a Monday when the sun goes down. It’s the quick dinner evening, the can’t-be-bothered night. A time where the crushing reality of work eclipses the enjoyment you experienced the day before. Rafael Nadal and Gilles Müller met in the Round of 16 in Wimbledon on “Manic Monday” that’s often a more threatening name than reality, but instead we got something that should have been unremarkable that became transcendent.

Everything before the fifth set was great in its own right, but like most things in sports, matches are at their best when things get weird — and the fifth set was the culmination of hours’ worth of oddities. Nadal fought back from the unfamiliar place of being on the verge of defeat — two match points. Then Müller capitulated and let the legend back in the match.

Things felt utterly predictable tied at 6-6 in the fifth. The expectation that Nadal would pull through, like we’ve seen before, and headlines would tell tales of how he “survived a scare,” or how he was “pushed to the limit.” Sure, there were times when things looked dire, and then suddenly he would pull off a shot that made your jaw drop.

There was no tangible reason Nadal would win. Grass has never been his best surface, recent results have proven Wimbledon to be a struggle for him, and he’d been trailing all game. Müller, to his credit, set the tempo to ensure the match was at his pace, not Rafa’s. Yet still, it felt like Nadal would pull through — because it felt like he was supposed to in 2017.

Every perfectly placed lob and looping volley hurtled the match towards kismet, but every single time Müller was there to answer with a power shot when he needed it. The tiebreak was incredible, exciting, goofy, and fun.

Then it wasn’t. Tennis has that ability to turn on a dime. It’s one of the few sports that has the potential to reach its crescendo, exceed it, and become uncomfortable to watch. Pain wracked the faces of the players as the time moved past four and a half hours, every shot was willed into existence from imperfect angles and faltering form.

The breaking point seemed to come at 11-10, when Nadal appealed to the umpire’s chair that he was being blinded by the sun setting over the sheen Wimbledon roof. There would be no respite, and the solution Nadal and the umpire reached was to get fans to stand and block as much of the glare as possible — it was that kind of night.

Nothing can maintain drama for an extended period of time without becoming comedy or tragedy, this match was a bit of both. It was no longer about besting each other, but outlasting — and two players in their 30s, playing a match longer than they should have on a night that shouldn’t have happened gave us just that.

Müller didn’t celebrate when it was finally over. He couldn’t. Equal parts shock and exhaustion kept his feet locked in place. His mind shattered from the back and forth.

It was poignant. The best and worst of tennis distilled into an hour. The closing moments of Nadal vs. Müller not only broke the two players, but Wimbledon’s scheduling. “Manic Monday” didn’t get its natural conclusion as Novak Djokovic vs. Adrian Mannarino was forced to be delayed because of how long the match went, and it was a welcome delay for fans. It had all been too much and none of us could handle another match.