Australian Open 2017: Roger Federer conquers Rafa Nadal, and the world

Did Donald Trump push the nuclear button overnight? Do tell, because it wouldn't have registered here, not while Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal were playing each other to such a standstill that the eternally gracious Federer said when he had at last secured victory that if only tennis allowed for draws, he would have been happy to accept one with Nadal this night.

Easy, even glib, for him to say? Yeah, but at least he said it and so summed it all up. This was the match in which it was said there could be no losers and it felt like there was more than one winner, one champion.

"New balls, please," said umpire James Keothavong as Federer prepared to serve for the match. He could say that again. Thirty-five years old, with no tournament play for six months, in his third successive five-setter, hurting in a groin that had needed treatment between sets – a luxury Federer has disdained all his career until two nights ago – and until moments previously a break down to Nadal, who gives no-one a break, he somehow prevailed.

He had to win the last five games of the match, and he did, and with them his first major title since 2012 and only his second since 2010. On his last leg, he was on his last legs, but what legs they are.

Roger Federer with the Australian Open trophy. Again.Credit: Getty Images

He cried. Didn't everyone? Wouldn't you?

It wasn't just that it was so long since this peerless pair had last played off. It was that they probably never will again. It is implausible that their peers and pursuers again all will falter at once as they did here. Federer could not even guarantee to be back in Australia next year, so keenly is he at last feeling the mortality that had outrun for so long.

Nadal has time on his side, Federer timelessness at his back, but this surely would be their epilogue. This was the final's animating force. This was the chance to appreciate what we had before it went and after it was gone at the same time. At the match's climax, the din in Rod Laver Arena was so ear-splitting that some of it had to be have been echoes. I haven't heard louder or more longing at a tennis match.

This was more than a tennis match, but it was a tennis match, none the less. No other sport lends itself quite so well to this sort of dramatisation. If cricket is an individual sport played by teams, tennis is a solo sport played by two, each isolated at his end, tasked with knocking out his opponent without touching him. But first, he must conquer himself.

Roger Federer: as determined as ever.Credit: Getty Images

For two sets, Federer and Nadal played by their standards wary tennis, jointly conscious that they knew one another's games as well as their own. They were like old friends playing cards; some of their exchanges might as well have been played with a wink. But in the third, Federer loosened and took charge, and it was as if he had stopped playing against Nadal and was playing instead for himself. Nadal kept playing Federer, because that is his way, to see the threat over the net and beat it. Federer sees an idea and goes with it.

But loose became too loose for Federer, and that was all Nadal needed, because he is, after all, the greatest of the greatest, and suddenly, he was 3-1 up in the fifth set. Both had spent last year in the wars, and come back from them, but of two rebored and rebirthed bodies, Nadal's now looked the sounder. While Federer was receiving treatment, Nadal made a point of doing short, sharp springs along one side of the court.

Roger Federer receives treatment from trainer during his men's singles final against Rafa Nadal.Credit: AP

This, though, was not gamesmanship. Nothing on the night was. This was the most senior final of all, and the most adult. Each played in inscrutable silence, reflecting mutual and absolute respect, without even the statutory triumphal fist-shaking between player and box. When Nadal's hit an exquisite crosscourt forehand that just about guaranteed him the fourth set, Federer applauded anyway. Much later, when summoned to the podium, he went first to Nadal with a pat of consolation. From anyone else, it might have come across as patronising, but not Federer, not to Nadal, not now.

But back in the fifth set, Federer was down a break and unable to win more than two points in a row against Nadal, and that appeared to be his personal wall. Frankly, he looked done. Suddenly, he won 10 points in a row to take back the break and forge one of his own, and if this had started as a match that sometimes could not get out of the way of its own billing, it now soared off to some ethereal plane of its own.

The last game was all of them in one. Federer fell 15-40 behind, squared it, challenged to spare himself a double fault at his first match point, was down another break point anyway, and even on his second match point had to wait as Nadal used his last challenge, willing Hawkeye to belie the evidence of his naked eye, and time stood still. At the crowning moment, both players were stock still, having done all they could, and that was fitting.

'Twas done. They're done, Federer and Nadal, in all likelihood, This Australian Open is done. It was the best edition yet, never to be bettered, unless you think it is possible that there will be a tournament some day in which the Williams sisters will play off again, and the two best-performed and best-loved men will, too, and it will go five sets, and nearly 800,000 people will bear witness over two weeks, and the weather will play no part, in which case you probably think it possible that anyone could get to the White House, too.

Get out of here.