Ostapenko's win at Wimbledon did not come with the manners a tune-up event might have suggested. She spent the fortnight blasting through seeds who were supposed to be settling in for the second week, and she finished it with the kind of unbothered, first-strike tennis that makes commentators reach for the thesaurus and then abandon it because "she just hits it very hard, very early, and it goes in" is the whole explanation. There is no cleaner way to win a Slam than to take the racquet out of the argument before the argument starts. The rest of the draw had a plan for her serve, her movement, her nerve under a Centre Court roof. Nobody had a plan for someone refusing to play the extended version of the match at all.

Follow the money and the story gets less romantic and more instructive: Wimbledon's champion still collects a fraction of what a single Saudi-backed exhibition now guarantees a marquee name for one appearance, no best-of-three required. The All England Club sells history, tradition, grass that has been rolled since before open era tennis existed, and it prices its trophy accordingly, which is to say modestly next to the appearance fees now floating around the sport's exhibition circuit. Ostapenko did not just win a title on Sunday. She won the one that still makes you earn it, which increasingly counts as its own kind of statement.