Serena Williams’s loss to Roberta Vinci was, beyond any reasonable doubt, a gargantuan upset.
But was it the biggest?
“Yes. Period. Period. Ever,” Pam Shriver said on Saturday, shortly after another 33-year-old — Flavia Pennetta, not Serena — hoisted the women’s trophy.
It is a perilous, seductive thing, this ranking of tennis surprises. And it is easy to let one’s judgment be shaken by the latest quake to rumble across the landscape.
Even the day after, it was the context that separated Vinci’s ambush from nearly all others and the fact that what ended up in the rubble was a Grand Slam.