Madison Key's three-set win in the ladies' final at the Australian Open over defending champion Aryna Sabalenka is a textbook case of couldn't happen to a more deserving lass. The one-time golden teen of American tennis, expected to be the heiress of our reigning queen Serena, reached her second major final at long last and this time took it all, a couple months after becoming Mrs. Bjorn Fratangelo and hinting that being married to the man she loved might be better than  being wed to a sport whose peak kept eluding her.

Djokovic has fair reason to be aggrieved, seeing as how he was targeted by Australian bureaucrats and let down by Tennis Australia in 2022.
Did that wise insight serve as the missing link to glory? At any rate, she played fearless and nearly flawless tennis, her big forehands and huge serves leading her famous offense, to take down the funny but saturnine, temper-and-nerve prone, even bigger forehanded star from the deep East, untouchable on hard courts for the past two years, world No. 1. And she did it after holding off world No. 2 Iga Swiatek in the semis, whose own nerves folded under Madisonian steel in the best match of the women's draw at Oz.
Wizardry it was not, Maddy was mighty, plain and simple; she played the game she always played and believed — with only-too- human bouts of doubts — would bring her to the top.
Holding the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup, she congratulates Aryna (who has recovered from a racquet-smashing fit of temper at Maddy's brilliant diagonal winner to clinch, and is back to her good-sport self), thanks everyone, tells her husband wittily how she loves him and adds she'll be back. Class act.
Novak Djokovic's exit from the tournament in the semis was, earlier in the week, a class act in grace under pressure.  Badly injured (hamstring tear, reportedly), in the quarter finals he had outthought and outplayed the mighty Carlos Alcaraz, fifteen years his junior and one of the fastest all-court get-every-impossible shot man in ...