Serena at the Crossroads, Part II: A glimpse of the future

This is the second in a two-part installment. Click here for part 1.

If Serena Williams is declining, it's not an easy decline to perceive. That's why presumptive examples thereof are so often explained away with speculative notions about lags in focus or intensity. 

What's important about those assessments is that they're one-offs; "focus" is a perfectly hazy catch-all that sounds like an easy fix - something that shouldn't be expected to carry over from one match to the next. Being the best at what you do, after all, doesn't mean being the best every minute. To paraphrase one of our culture's foremost arbiters of throneship: at one point or another, everyone's bound to be a little slow, a little late. 

Williams' game also has a way of resisting diagnosis, because her best tennis is efficient and clean to the point of sterility. At its best, her game seems less a subject to the laws of nature than an extension of them; intractable, unassailable, and perfectly rational. To watch peak Serena Williams is to watch the consequences of her opponent's every mistake ripple inexorably through space. 

Watch Williams at other times and you'll see her make glaring tactical blunders, badly mistime her overheads, open up early on groundstrokes, pull balls rather than swing through them, lose the zip on her serve, and drag her feet between points while looking close to tears. 

Depending on where you sit, the disappointment and confusion of those showings either fades or is amplified when she performs like she did at the 2014 US Open, when she's so overpowering you can't help but feel that every tournament is hers to win or lose. 

Vexing as the off-matches are, they've never felt like portents so much as inevitable, even necessary elements of her game's natural regenerative cycle. The same things that make nature beautiful and perfect also make it combustible and destructive, but arguing with its structural integrity kind of misses the point. 

Old as Roger

That said, even the natural world has an expiry date. Much is made of what Roger Federer has been able to accomplish at his age, but strangely little of the same astonishment is attached to Williams - who's less than two months Federer's junior. I suspect this has something to do with the fact she's never had to reshape her game. 

Federer slipped perceptibly in 2013, then caught a second wind by using his extraordinary hands as a bulwark against his slowing feet, switching to a larger racket and staking out a new outpost at the net. But Williams' game isn't and never has been about artistry, deception or even deft touch. When you've got the tour's best serve and best strokes from either wing, it doesn't need to be. 

Hers is a stripped-down power game. She attacks relentlessly from the baseline, positions herself flawlessly, pins her opponents deep, refuses to let them get on top of a rally, chews them up with her serve, converts all her put-away chances. She blasts people off the court.

It's worth wondering how much longer she'll be able to keep winning that way, and whether she'll be able to adapt when she no longer can.

Still No. 1

Williams doesn't have to worry about that yet; her best is still better than anyone else's. Two things, though, are starting to change: First, the gap between those respective bests is shrinking. Second, Williams is playing her best with slightly less frequency. She has to dig deeper to get there.

This year could tell us a lot about how deep she's prepared to dig. We already know she's a fighter. She's overcome a lot in her career - from personal tragedy to life-threatening health issues to mental illness. Yet age-related decline has scarcely entered the picture. It's coming, eventually - has maybe even begun already - though it could take some time for the fissures to show.

It's entirely possible Williams will win multiple Grand Slams in 2015. It's possible she’ll win none. The 15 years connecting her first major to her most recent is the longest such span for any player, man or woman, in the Open Era. In 2013, she became the oldest woman to ever own the No. 1 seed, and all she's done since is hold it for 100 consecutive weeks. It's her longest-ever sojourn at the top. By far.

In other words, we're in uncharted territory here, and have been for a minute. Nothing should come as a surprise.