The most pertinent observation by Nick Kyrgios before his second-round match of the Australian Open was that Daniil Medvedev had evolved into twice the player whom Kyrgios defeated in a pair of matches in 2019.
The implication made by others was that taking Kyrgios away from John Cain Arena — "the Kyrgios court", as the man himself had accurately termed it — and placing him on centre court would make the Australian half the force he'd been in front of his "zoo" of superfans.
Did it play on Kyrgios's mind in his somewhat inevitable four-set loss to the tournament favourite? In the early stages, it seemed so. Kyrgios has a tendency to make meltdowns out of molehills, and here again was a classic case.
In Medvedev's first service game of the match, Kyrgios earned two break points and started windmilling his arms to wind up the crowd, as though they weren't doing enough to help him.
Moments later, the break points were fluffed, highlighting the sort of backwards logic that helps Kyrgios produce slices of unpredictable genius but just as often sabotages him in crunch moments.
The rest could have flowed entirely from there. Kyrgios dropped the first set with a disastrous tie break, summed up by the stadium-wide groan at when his first double-fault of the match arrived at precisely the wrong time.
The toll of the foregoing — the first set was 62 minutes of power, aerobic exertion and shredded nerves — could be seen halfway through the second set, when Kyrgios was battling to hold serve and labouring under the immense physical strain that Medvedev inflicts on his opponents. Asthma and a COVID-19 diagnosis had also blighted Kyrgios's preparation.
Kyrgios's second double-fault of the match had the same effect as the first — Medvedev pounced and took the second set 6-4 in 44 minutes. The third should have been a formality, but there was a surprise in store in the seventh game — an unpleasant one for Medvedev, but a life-affirming delight for everyone watching.
In short, Kyrgios found reserves of energy and sheer brilliance that had seemed beyond him in the first two hours of the match. Loping around the court with feline intensity and the backing of a crowd no more respectful of his opponent than those usually found at John Cain, Kyrgios swung from the hip and broke in the ninth game.
That is not to say that Kyrgios's revival was unsubtle. Despite a distracting interplay with the crowd and his usual bickering with the umpire, he needed to be canny to drag himself back into it. To do so, he partly abandoned the baseline battle he'd been losing and brought Medvedev to the net more often.
The moment of the night — one for Kyrgios's career highlights reel, even — came when Kyrgios served out the third set and lost himself in tongue-wagging celebration — one part frilled-neck lizard, two parts Gene Simmons. A muttering mess only 40 minutes earlier, now he had the crowd under a spell.
Alas, it was his final shot. In the fourth, Medvedev served like a demon, breezing through love games and losing only a single point on his first serve. The pressure on Kyrgios intensified to unbearable levels and he was broken in the sixth game thanks to Medvedev's flat and unimprovable double-handed backhand.
The pity of such an engaging contest was how unsportingly the Melbourne crowd treated Medvedev — a fact even Kyrgios acknowledged, to his credit. During the match itself, Medvedev allowed himself nothing more demonstrative than a few fist pumps. After it, he sarcastically unleashed on the crowd and not without justification.
But this result was not a matter of psychology or partisanship. In patches, Kyrgios was excellent. All night, Medvedev was just far better — faster, hungrier, more controlled. The way he regularly retrieved Kyrgios's 215kph serves from near the players' entrance tunnel, hitting crisp and controlled returns, was nothing short of astonishing.
For Kyrgios, this is not a disastrous result. His illnesses had set expectations low. But time is marching on. This was his ninth Australian Open campaign. In his second — back in 2015, when a decade of deep runs in the slams seemed like his birthright — he reached the quarter-finals. With this loss, his tournament average is now closer to a second-round departure than third.
It's a pity for fans more than anything. At a time when so much elite sport is overhyped and interchangeable, the few summer nights per year Australians spend in Kyrgios's unpredictable company tend to linger in the memory.
Will he ever take the big leap? It seems unlikely. He's nearly 27 now and has played only 15 tournaments in the last two years, making drastic improvements unlikely.
Yet Kyrgios remains as watchable as anyone, and it is hard not to like him in moments like the one leading into this match when he said his prevailing feeling about facing Medvedev was excitement that he'd be playing one of the best in the world in the prime-time slot this contest deserved.
The worry is that one day he'll blink and realise these matches are just high-end matinees.
