Don’t be fooled by the pyrotechnic highlights making their way across your feed this morning: The U.S. Open quarterfinal between Ben Shelton and Carlos Alcaraz last night (mostly this morning) was a grind.

Make no mistake, it was a beautiful grind. It achieved the nigh-impossible task of getting Kevin Hart to put down his phone. It got John McEnroe to utter the line “just when he was ready to jump out of his pants, he delivered that serve” in commentary. Shelton’s 6-7 (5), 6-1, 6-3, 1-6, 7-6 (7) victory was at once a scheduling farce that kept large swaths of New York up until 3:33 a.m. (a fact that the broadcasters celebrated repeatedly but should really be grounds for those involved in the scheduling decisions to send apology payments to everybody who has to work today) and made early-morning tennis seem like the coolest thing ever. Shelton picked up his first win over Alcaraz, saddled Alcaraz with his first five-set defeat in almost half a decade, and is responsible for a few hundred thousand or so people falling asleep at their desks today. But did he ever have to suffer for those accolades.

It has to be said that Alcaraz, a seven-time Grand Slam champion, wasn’t at his best. He spent the past four and a half months sidelined by a wrist injury, and the Open seemed like an odd place to make his return — he had no base of match practice, leaving him unprepared for the ruthless best-of-five-sets format the men play at all the majors. Through four rounds, though, Alcaraz’s timing looked perfect. He dropped just one set over the first week and entered the Shelton match fresh off an evisceration of Tommy Paul that seemed to solidify him as the tournament favorite. But early in the second........

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