When Roger Federer won back his Australian Open title a year ago, five years after his previous Grand Slam title, it felt like an impossible gift from the past, one final reminder of what had once been at a time when all assumed it had gone forever.
The man was 35. He had been out for six months after knee surgery and back problems, 17th seed for a reason. You were astonished by the comeback and you were thankful to have witnessed one glorious final heist.
We were all fools. In the past 12 months Federer has now won three Grand Slam titles. At 36 he began this Aussie Open as favourite and then won it with the loss of only two sets (and both of those in the final).
This is not nostalgia. This is now. This a new dominance, not an echo of past glories, a greatest hits tour that has produced three fresh classics.
In the build-up to Sunday’s final against Marin Cilic, Federer went into Melbourne to seek inspiration by watching Gary Oldman’s new Churchill biopic.
It was his only misjudgement of the fortnight. Darkest Hour? This is more a second golden age, and there is no reason to think it will be a brief one.
In the six years from 2011 to 2016, Federer won just one Grand Slam title. A year ago he was supposed to be not only past his prime but past the period when he was past his prime.
He injured his knee running a bath for his four kids. At Wimbledon he fell on his face in futile chase of a forehand from Milos Raonic, a man with half his range of skills but nine years younger and faster. He had finally admitted that he needed to use a bigger racquet-head, like a man accepting middle age by wearing reading glasses round the house.
Novak Djokovic was the king, Andy Murray in charge of his own grassy empire. The kids were queuing up outside them. A graceful retirement appeared to be accelerating round the corner.
And now this: an Australian Open title, the regaining of his Wimbledon crown, the retention of his title in Melbourne. With Rafa Nadal defending a lot of ranking points over the next two months, it is quite possible that Federer could be world number one again by the end of March.
Ali would have two more defining nights, once when out-surviving Joe Frazier in that brutal death-spiral in Manilla a year later, again when winning his re-match with Leon Spinks at an age when his aura could barely disguise the damage done to his body and mind.
You would describe it as raging at the dying of the light, but he could never rage. These triumphs have been made with the same physical grace and unhurried style as a decade ago.
There were times on Sunday – the tournament’s extreme heat policy in place, the roof on and the stationary spectators gasping in the humidity – when Cilic looked so hot and bothered that you could see sweat flying off his racquet as well as his forehead.
Nick Kyrgios is still what might be. Bernard Tomic, the other great local hope, is closing in on might have been. As Federer lifted the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup on Sunday, Tomic was being bitten by a snake on the Australian version of I’m A Celebrity.
The competition has fallen away. When he won Wimbledon last summer it was the first time in almost eight years that he had not had to play one of the other Big Four en route to a Slam final, and in Melbourne that pattern repeated.
But as it has done so, Federer has risen again, and only the small-minded and cynical could not be moved by the impossibility of it all.
