Too Soonjokes

Ben Shelton beat Alcaraz at 3:30 in the morning, the latest finish in US Open history. Twenty-three thousand people watched the sun come up at a tennis match and took the 7 train to work. That's not a tournament, that's a shift.

Shelton dedicated the win to his grandmother, who got his father into tennis. His father coached him from the box. Three generations to make one final, and the German across the net will try to end it in three hours.

Coco Gauff plays Rybakina in the semis tonight. She's 22, has a French Open, and DraftKings calls it a coin flip. In the year she was born, the last American to win the US Open was already retired. The country waited 22 years for a coin flip.

Rybakina beat Sabalenka in a thriller for her first US Open. She's from Kazakhstan by way of Moscow, playing in Queens, in front of 23,000 people who paid $900 to whisper and one State Department that won't let them visit. The trophy's going home through customs.

America turned 250 and buried a time capsule with documents from all three branches of government. Someone in 2126 will dig it up and find three branches that couldn't agree on what to put in a box.

Shelton or Tiafoe will play a German or a Russian for the title. This is the plot of every war we won in the 20th century, with better shoes and a worse crowd.