“We were checking the radar a little bit before the match and it did look like we had a couple of hours of dry,” said Bob Bryan, after he and his twin, Mike, rallied for a three-set doubles victory Sunday in the first match of the day in Ashe Stadium. Nobody wants to be cooped up for hours.

Juan Martín del Potro can empathize. “We’ve been at the locker room preparing the match like three, four times a day, then the rains coming again,” del Potro of Argentina said Wednesday after his match, originally scheduled for the day session, finally concluded after 4 hours 13 minutes, and deep into the evening.

Sloane Stephens, the American who had a nice run here before hitting the brick wall named Serena Williams on Sunday, recalled her ordeal Wednesday: “Literally, every 10 minutes they kept saying: ‘If Murray plays long, we’ll move you. If it rains, we won’t.’ ”

“I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s horrible,’ ” Stephens said. “I never started that late. It was definitely a long experience. But I played good. Maybe I should do that more often.”

What was the toughest challenge in waiting? “Finding something to do,” Stephens said. Her solution? “I warmed up. I ate. I looked on Instagram, trying to figure out what picture I was going to post tomorrow. I literally had nothing to do. I was on my phone talking to my mom. Random stuff.”

With a tropical storm, hurricanes and showers affecting the last five tournaments, fans began to feel like canaries in the coal mine — the first victims of some new danger. Last year, Danny Zausner, the chief operating officer of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, asked CompuWeather to look into the U.S.T.A.’s long-held premise that late August and early September are a relatively dry time in Queens.

The fact is, the Open, formerly an amateur event known as the Nationals, has had its share of delays over the decades, some of them epic. The U.S.T.A. devotes three full pages of its media guide to delays, including the hurricane that roared across Long Island into Connecticut in 1938 and killed more than 500 people. Tennis resumed six days later, with the finals played on Sept. 24.