Rafael Nadal explores the realm of impossibilities during win over Novak Djokovic

One of the most mysterious things about sports, and about humanity in general, has to be the seemingly superhuman strength that players acquire when pushed to the absolute limit of their endurance. You can talk all you want about slower courts, advanced racquet technology or even improved fitness levels among the pros, but when a match goes deep into a 5th set and each player continues chasing down every shot with an enthusiasm that borders on the maniacal, you run out of explanations.

The fact that it seems to happen so often these days – nearly every Slam produces at least a couple such epics – makes it even more belief-defying. Tommy Robredo manufactured not one, not two, but three such inexplicably long-drawn displays of stamina at this year’s French Open; Stanislas Wawrinka and Richard Gasquet produced their own exhibition of nerveless shot-making deep into their 4th round encounter; and yesterday, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic did – there’s no better way to say this – an encore of their 2012 Australian Open final. Fittingly, the last of these epics (no disrespect to David Ferrer here, but it’s hard to see him push Nadal to 5 sets in the final) was the most dramatic of them all, even if it wasn’t the most high quality affair (that title remains with the Wawrinka-Gasquet match).

It’s a little strange to see how every notable rivalry in the world of sports sooner or later morphs into something much more than a mere contest of skill or stamina. Nadal vs Djokovic started out as a pure battle of spin vs power, but after all these years it has also turned into a battle of of aggression vs steadiness, of surface superiority vs career legacy, of high-flying confidence vs unyielding patience, of self-belief vs passion, of mind vs heart. That’s what we like to think, anyway. Do the two players themselves think of their rivalry in such larger-than-life terms?

For vast stretches of yesterday’s match, it seemed like every one of those elements was actually playing on the players’ minds. For the second year running, Djokovic, he of the self-proclaimed career Slam ambitions, seemed to let the occasion get to him, as his normally-reliable backhand leaked errors all over the place at the start. The moment Nadal went up by a set and a break though, Djokovic summoned all of his self-belief and played a couple of flawless return games to even the match at one set all. That, naturally, was followed by a near-flawless set by Nadal, whose forehand, specially the down-the-line variant, kept gaining in confidence with each passing minute. For all the feverish anticipation that had preceded the match, the match seemed to be proceeding along obstinately predictable lines up to that point. Add the fact that the two refused, or were unable, to play their best tennis at the same time, and the ‘epic’ quotient of the match was correspondingly non-existent.