There’s no escaping the reality that Federer remains constant

NEW YORK -- He has drained our computer keyboards of just about every metaphor. There are few phrases left to turn, few original ways to describe Roger Federer, the United States Open tennis champion for the fourth consecutive year.

In Sunday’s final, he beat a bright and popular young Serb named Novak Djokovic, who had five set points in the first set and seven total. In that first set, his five set points were on his serve, and he still ended up losing the set in a tiebreaker.

Someday, Djokovic will realize he was playing Houdini, not Federer.

On the third set point, Federer nipped the baseline twice. On the fifth, he returned a 123-mph first serve deep to Djokovic’s backhand corner and all the Serb could do was lunge and hit it long.

In that same first set, Federer, who seldom calls on the electronic challenge machine, almost as if doing so is beneath him, used it twice and was right both times.

In the second set, with Federer serving at 5-6, Djokovic reached his seventh set point of the match and promptly hit a forehand that was called out on the baseline. He challenged it and Hawkeye, perhaps also in awe of Federer, showed the ball a silly millimeter long. It was so close that Djokovic squatted for a while and bowed his head.

Poor Djokovic, who is just a fun-loving 20-year-old who jumped onto the radar screen of sport fans everywhere with his late-night impersonations of other players Thursday, will feel better once he starts to understand that he lost to a higher being.

Or, as tennis commentator Mary Carillo is fond of asking, rhetorically: “Does Roger have a belly button like the rest of us?”

Sadly, for the sport, Federer will now take his belly button home to Switzerland, and with it, the prominence his presence gives, and has given, his sport for so long. The pro tennis traveling road show will scatter players all over the globe, and what was competing daily for the front page of sports sections the last two weeks will quickly slip to the back pages again. That is the nature of the beast, the way the sport runs. Hundreds of tournaments and only a handful matter.

This one mattered. If you measure success by numbers, the 2007 U.S. Open was like Federer. It was No. 1.

Two weeks of glorious weather led to record crowds. The 25,230 Sunday, which included about 1,500 people who bought tickets just to be on the grounds, sit next to the fountains and watch on the big screen outside of Ashe Stadium, brought the two-week attendance total to 721,087. The USTA proudly called this year’s tournament “the largest annually attended sports event in the world.”

Last year was a hard act to top. Andre Agassi’s three-match run to his retirement and then his final-match speech were great theater. But right from the Aug. 27 start, there was a lot going on here this year.

The late Althea Gibson was honored on the 50th anniversary of the year she became the first black player to win a U.S. national title. Later, Serena and Venus Williams made it to the quarterfinals and semifinals, respectively, and much was made of the barrier-breaking that Gibson had done for them.

There was the cloud of gambling that Russia’s Nikolay Davydenko brought with him from a recent tournament in Poland, where lots of money was bet on his opponent after Davydenko won the first set in a match he eventually defaulted with an injury. The press did its best to grill him here, even as he won all the way to the semifinals. But his broken English broke our spirits. The ATP will interview him on the subject next week, presumably with good translators.

U.S. favorite James Blake had a nice run until Tommy Haas knocked him out, and the tournament became 50% quieter with the departure of Blake’s dressed-alike rooting section, the J-Block. They were loyal and spirited, as well as sophomoric and annoying.

About the time Maria Sharapova was being deprived of a chance to defend her women’s title by an 18-year-old from Poland named Agnieszka Radwanska, who has pet rats named Flippy and Floppy, the tall tree fresh out of the University of Georgia, John Isner, was dropping 140-mph serves from his 6-foot-9 frame and actually taking a set off Federer.

Justine Henin was gutting her way through an incredible tennis triple play, beating both Williams sisters and still having enough left to win the title. Soon, Djokovic was impersonating Sharapova and Rafael Nadal on late-night TV, to rave reviews, and adding his own star power to the final.

In a two-week blur, days moved to nights and back again. It took forever and it was over in a flash. But in the end, there was that which we originally came to see, came to expect would ultimately happen and were still amazed that it did.

King Roger I, from the country of Invincibility, was crowned again.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at [email protected]. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.