She finds a first serve on match point and the contact is perfect: 117mph, punched hard down the centre line, and from the moment her hand receives the message from her strings, she must know this is it. Of course the ball may come back, and indeed the ball does come back, but only barely. And in those few seconds as it arcs over the net, springs back up off the grass and hangs there like a beautiful sweet fruit, Coco Gauff has a Wimbledon final in her grasp.
The afternoon has been hot: viciously hot, sadistically hot, the sort of heat that seems to take years from you. In the crowd, paper fans wave and flutter like butterflies, and this has been a match full of natural beauty, of clean swings and satisfying timing and brilliant shapes set against pale green. And still the return from Karolina Muchova hangs there, high and slow, a sentence demanding a punctuation mark, a piece of Centre Court cinema about to roll the credits.
