In an ugly world, Alcaraz and Sinner elevate us with their relentless beauty

What else does this to us? Makes us pray to strangers on TV at 2am, swear and sweat. Makes us think of adventure, poetry, engineering and the miraculous. Makes us decide, "&^%$ work tomorrow". Makes us feel grateful to be alive and search for adjectives, only to find "fantastic" won't fit but maybe "delirious" will.

- Rohit Brijnath

What does this? Only sport some days.

Music lifts us, so does dance, but it's the competition in sport, the uncertainty, the swinging momentum and quivering faith, the fearless tightrope walk between risk and ruin, the unearthing of bravery by humans who look emptied, which brings an unrivalled edginess.

And so for that we should send a thank-you note to Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner — the Spaniard won 4-6, 6-7 (4-7), 6-4, 7-6 (7-3), 7-6 (10-2) — for their 329-minute, physically debilitating, mentally wrenching, audacity-filled Roland Garros final. In the end one man who refused to fall was flat on his back and the other stood tall even as he had been forced to bend. It takes two athletes to write an epic.

This wasn't just any sport, not just drama, comebacks and 43 drop shots, but sport without extended bathroom breaks, tantrums and glares, sport where both men overruled calls in their rival's favour, sport where only a match was lost but so much gained.