THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, London — After a two-and-a-half-hour roller-coaster in the swelter of Centre Court, Coco Gauff stood just behind the service line, with a fuzzy yellow ball bouncing up shoulder-high in front of her.All she had to do was take the measure of it, to do what she had done with so many thousands of balls like that against so many hundreds of opponents.It’s the moment every player would kill for on match point for a Grand Slam final berth — a blasted first serve down the middle that sends their opponent lunging, and a short sitter to seal the match. To seal a wild comeback, from a set down and well behind in the match-deciding tiebreak. And to seal a first Wimbledon final, after years of frustration and futility on grass.Instead, Gauff saw Muchová pinned deep, with so much empty green between her and the net. Instead of letting her arm fly one last time, she stops. She hitches her elbow back a click, then decelerates it forward, intending to drop the ball delicately over the tape.Instead, she watches the ball dying in the middle of the net.Muchová is still alive. Gauff can’t even remember the score. She turns to walk back to the baseline. She knows she has to serve another point. But she’s forgotten that it’s 9-9 in a tiebreak, so she also has to switch ends of the court.She’s supposed to be celebrating the realization of every player’s dream. Instead, this one has taken a cruel turn in what was already fever-dream territory, and it will end in a 6-2, 1-6, 7-6(12-10) win for Muchová, to set up an all-Czech final against Linda Nosková, the No. 9 seed.A year ago, the women’s final at Wimbledon showed the world one kind of tennis nightmare. Iga Świątek beat Amanda Anisimova 6-0, 6-0 on the sport’s biggest stage. A year later came another kind, this time in the semifinals.The win that is not there, until it suddenly is — until it suddenly disappears again, in the form of a ball that Gauff will probably see over and over for weeks, and then again in the months and years ahead, when she least expects it.Maybe she will be driving alone to a friend’s house. Or sitting on a beach reading a book. Or online at the airport.There’s the ball. There’s the open grass. There’s the finish line.“People who don’t watch tennis are going to be like, ‘Why didn’t you do that?’” she said. “But at the end of the day, it’s like, that’s the choice I made.“Was it the right one in that moment? Maybe not.”Here’s maybe the cruelest of tennis ironies. Two weeks ago, Gauff probably would have signed for a hard-fought semifinal loss. She hadn’t won a match on grass in two years. At Wimbledon, one win might be nice. A trip to the quarterfinals would be pure heaven, further than she’d ever been before.How Coco Gauff has found the secret to playing on grassMatthew Futterman and Madison EadesThere’s also every chance that Gauff one day also looks back on her Wimbledon run of 2026 as another of those hinge moments in her career. They seem to happen a lot at Wimbledon.