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Coco Gauff, seen here on Jan. 24, 2020, looks like she’s having a lot of fun out there. She looks like nothing but fun.ASANKA BRENDON RATNAYAKE/The New York Times News Service

Serena Williams has never been beaten at tennis in her life. Whenever she does lose, she falls back on the same excuse – it wasn’t you, it’s me.

“I didn’t return like Serena,” Williams said after being ground to dust by China’s Wang Qiang in the third round of the Australian Open. “Honestly, if we were just honest with ourselves, I lost that match.”

Honestly, it didn’t look that way. Williams’s inability to admit the obvious either shows her heart of a champion or a growing capacity for self-delusion. Probably a bit of both.

Later, Williams was asked if she believes she will equal Margaret Court’s record of 24 grand slam wins. (She’s been sitting on 23 for three years.)

“I don’t play just to have fun,” Williams shot back.

That may be the problem.

Because Coco Gauff – the T-1000 to Williams’s original Terminator – looks like she’s having a lot of fun out there. She looks like nothing but fun.

Gauff put a stake in the heart of Venus Williams’s career in Melbourne. Then she laid a beating on defending champion Naomi Osaka.

Osaka, who is becoming the tennis version of a hard-drinking detective looking for a reason to care again, didn’t take it very well.

“You don’t want to lose to a 15-year-old, you know.”

Unfortunately for her, everyone else wants that to happen. Osaka, just 22, is already being fitted for her ‘Where Are They Now?’ retrospective.

Which brings us to the evergreen theme of every new tennis season – turnover. As in, will there be any?

On Friday, Roger Federer won his 100th singles match at the Australian Open. That doesn’t sound like a ton. But were you to win every match at a grand slam for 14 straight years, that would give you 98 victories. So it’s a ton.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Federer and, to a lesser extent, Williams is that no one wants to see them gone.

Eventually, we get sick of most pros or, at least, bored by them. You can see this happening to the likes of Sidney Crosby.

He’s still amongst the very best in hockey, but nobody talks much about him any more. There is no new information to discuss. He’s just over there, being good. It won’t be until he begins to fail that people will tune back in en masse. Then regret kicks in and we all moan about how much we’ll miss him.

Federer and Williams each had small blips when they faded from wider consideration, no more than a year or so in the midst of two-plus decades of career. But they came out of it riding powerful waves of nostalgia.

Oddly, that didn’t mean they were leaving. At 38, neither seems inclined to ever quit. They talk less about it now than they once did.

What’s missing in each instance is an heir.

Athletes of Williams’s and Federer’s pedigree don’t leave on their own. They have to be forced out. Since you can’t cut or non-tender a tennis player, this requires an element of humiliation.

No young, male player has taken Federer on in this way. A few of them will occasionally beat him, but then spend the post-match begging his forgiveness for doing so.

We can only imagine what a 22-year-old John McEnroe or Jimmy Connors would have had to say about Federer in his geriatric phase. No current comer in the men’s game has the gall.

They are either too fragile or too afraid to take a real pop at him.

Which is a shame. Idols aren’t meant to be polished forever. Eventually, someone has to tip them over.

Williams has had similar luck.

Everyone wants to beat her, but no one wants to show her up. Osaka did that at the 2018 U.S. Open, and Williams pulled her trick of making the loss all about herself. Osaka came out of the encounter devastated. Other challengers took note. At that point, and very briefly, Osaka was the player most likely to put Williams into retirement. But like Eugenie Bouchard, Osaka’s reaction to hitting the top of the charts was to fire the band. Now repped by a new support staff, she’s gone into performative freefall.

That opened a lane for Canada’s Bianca Andreescu.

Andreescu didn’t appear intimidated by Williams. After beating her at the Rogers Cup, she had the temerity to console her elder.

Williams knew better than to refuse the gesture, but you could tell she didn’t appreciate it. Andreescu followed with a comprehensive win over Williams in last year’s U.S. Open final. The future and present were finally colliding.

But since then, Andreescu has been hobbled by injury. You’re beginning to worry that her career template isn’t Steffi Graf or Monica Seles, but Milos Raonic – never healthy enough to get on a roll.

That leaves the floor open to Gauff.

The beautiful thing about being 15 years old is that you don’t know what you don’t know. Gauff plays like she has no specific goals in mind. She is freed of the visualization cult that’s taken over sports.

After getting her head handed to her, Osaka said her new focus is “just winning tournaments.”

How about just playing as if the court hasn’t been repainted to make it 10 feet narrower? Why not try that first?

Gauff is still in that lovely stage where every win takes her by surprise. And not in some phony, ‘I have so much respect for her over there’ way. It’s more like a kid who has just figured out she has super powers.

“Honestly, what is my life?” Gauff said after beating Osaka. “This is crazy.”

The funny thing? You could tell she meant it. She was laughing in that gulping, goofy way that is indicative of genuine shock.

Gauff isn’t out there thinking, like Osaka. She’s out there doing, a quality that defined Williams’s game when she was at her best.

That quality – rather than any of her physical gifts – is what now makes Gauff the latest person most likely to end the Serena Williams era.

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